Brain Surgery Patient Trapped in a Mental Time Warp

diverge_s writes "BrainConnection has an interesting article about a man who lives life straight out of the movie Memento. FTA: "When twenty-seven year old Henry M. entered the hospital in 1953 for radical brain surgery that was supposed to cure his epilepsy, he was hopeful that the procedure would change his life for the better. Instead, it trapped him in a mental time warp where TV is always a new invention and Truman is forever president. The removal of large sections of his temporal lobes left Henry unable to form any new personal memories, but his tragic loss revolutionized the field of psychology and made "H.M." the most-studied individual in the history of brain research.""

Comments

Re:I never considered surgery

[bloodredsun]

Actually as someone who has just finished a PhD in Neurophysiology I feel I may be a little better placed to comment than your average /. reader

Complex partial seizures originating in the temporal lobe have one of the best success rates in epilepsy surgery, but surgery is only offered to patients whos epilepsy is medically refractive (cannot be controlled by drugs) and affects their life in such as way that they would strongly benefit from surgery. Temporal lobe epilepsy is most often caused by mesial temporal or hippocampal sclerosis, this means that that part of the brain has become scarred and shrunk and this damage is causing the seizures. So this part of the brain supports a minimal amount of function. As your seizures are probably well controlled by drugs, you would never have been offered a surgical option.

we still don't know enough about the way it works to reliably fix problems that the brain itself cannot handle.
That's correct to a certain extent, but we do know a lot more and one of them is how to avoid causing the sort of condition that HM suffers.