A video went viral this week, showing a man named Jason Mortensen, who purportedly has amnesia, waking up from surgery and complimenting a woman for her beauty, but it turns out to his his wife.
The video got generous coverage on Gawker.com and BuzzFeed after it hit the top of Reddit. The man was apparently married to his wife for six years and did not remember her.
However, Slate.com interviewed a psychologist at the University of California-San Diego, Dr. Larry Squire, who suggested to the website that it might be a hoax.
He said that of the two types of amnesia, one is called psychogenic amnesia, which involves memory loss but isn’t usually associated with surgery. The other type is caused by a loss of oxygen during surgery but it entails learning new information, not memory loss
“It would not affect something so salient in a person’s life,” Squire said.
The video is the only one uploaded to Mortensen’s YouTube channel.
A Reddit user posted that they found a headshot of Mortensen on a old acting-audition website, suggesting that he was an aspiring actor at one point, according to the Globe and Mail.
