A mother who one day woke up believing she was a teenager after losing 17 years of memory overnight is set to detail her remarkable experience in a new book . In 2008 , Naomi Jacobs - then aged 32 - woke up terrified of her son , in totally unrecognisable surroundings and thought she was 15 years old . Overnight , she had been struck with Transient Global Amnesia , a form of memory loss brought on by stress that had wiped the 'episodic ' part of her memory . Naomi Jacobs was 32 when she woke up one morning having lost her memory of the past 17 years of her life . The last thing she could remember was falling asleep in her bunk bed as a schoolgirl , dreaming about a boy she had a crush on . She thought it was 1992 , John Major was prime minister and she was about to sit her GCSEs . Mobile phones were still the size of a house brick , the internet a mystery - and her 10-year-old son was a stranger . But Miss Jacobs told the BBC it was when her son bounded up to her yelling 'mum ' that she succumbed to 'total shock ' . She said : 'Everything from fear to joy from seeing this child that I did n't have any memory of giving birth to , but knew undoubtedly that he was mine because he looked so much like me , to terror of having the responsibility of this small child . ' I was convinced that I was going to fall asleep again that night and wake up in 1992 . It was n't real to me what was happening . ' Miss Jacobs pictured as a 15-year-old - the age she believed she was when she woke up one morning when struck by amnesia in her early 30s . Miss Jacobs had Transient Global Amnesia , a form of memory loss brought on by stress . It affects five in 100,000 people in Britain , rising to 23 in 100,000 in the over 50s . Before her attack , Miss Jacobs , of Manchester , was worrying about a homeopathy business she ran . She was studying for a psychology degree and had her final exams approaching , and had recently split up with the father of her child . The condition caused the 'episodic ' part of her memory to shut down , meaning she had lost all her emotional memories . But her semantic memory was still intact , meaning she could remember things she had repeated over time such as how to drive and phone numbers she had regularly dialled . Miss Jacobs has previously described lying awake at night and crying as she desperately tried to make sense of her life and longed to be back at school . She is now set to detail how she began to understand who she was in a new book , titled Forgotten Girl . The book reveals how she went about piecing her life back together using her personal diaries and those close to her . There is no specific treatment for Transient Global Amnesia other than support and reassurance from family and loved ones . Fortunately , Miss Jacobs had this support , and after eight weeks her memory began to return to normal . Transient global amnesia ( TGA ) is a type of amnesia involving the sudden , temporary disturbance in an otherwise healthy person 's memory . The leading hypotheses are some form of epileptic event , a problem with blood circulation around , to or from the brain , or some kind of migraine-like phenomenon . TGA attacks are associated with some form of precipitating event in at least one-third of cases . In females , this event is more often of a strong emotional character ; in males , it is more often related to some physical exertion . The most commonly cited precipitating events include sexual intercourse , swimming in cold water or enduring other temperature changes , and emotionally traumatic or stressful events . TGA is most common in people between age 56 and 75 , with the average age of a person experiencing TGA being approximately 62 .
Naomi Jacobs woke up 32 morning believing she was 15 years old . She was in fact a 32-year-old mother of 32 running her own business . Miss Jacobs had been struck by what is called Transient Global Amnesia . The condition had wiped away the past 17 years of her memory overnight . She admits succumbing to 'total shock ' when her son called her 'mum '