Evidence of very fast memory consolidation: an intracarotid amytal study.

This study provides evidence from intracarotid amobarbital tests (IAT) in patients with epilepsy that complete suppression of the electrophysiological activity of the left language-dominant hemisphere through left IAT does not impair memory for verbal information given 1 min or immediately before the injection of the barbiturate. Although language functions were completely disrupted and patients were unable to encode new information during the left IAT, pre/post memory was as good as in the right IAT. This lack of retrograde amnesia leads to the conclusion that a relatively stable representation of events is achieved within seconds after encoding. The results contradict models which assume that short-term memory is based on purely electrophysiological processes.