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The Unforgettable Amnesiac
jamie found an account in the NYTimes of the life and death of one of the most important figures in modern neuroscience, Henry Gustav Molaison — a man who could not form memories. Molaison became an amnesiac after a brain operation in 1953. Known worldwide as H.M., Molaison was studied intensively for 55 years. Dr. Brenda Milner, a psychologist from Montreal, was the first researcher to visit Molaison. In 1962 she authored a landmark study demonstrating that a part of Molaison's memory was fully intact. "The implications were enormous. Scientists saw that there were at least two systems in the brain for creating new memories. One, known as declarative memory, records names, faces and new experiences and stores them until they are consciously retrieved. ... Another system, commonly known as motor learning, is subconscious and depends on other brain systems. This explains why people can jump on a bike after years away from one and take the thing for a ride, or why they can pick up a guitar that they have not played in years and still remember how to strum it. Soon 'everyone wanted an amnesic to study,' Dr. Milner said..."
I forgot.
I can't remember if it was this case or another, but in a cognitive psych class I had, we watched a video about a man who couldn't form new long-term memories. His own wife would walk into a room once, then a second time a few minutes later, and he'd greet her as if he hadn't seen her in years. The most disturbing part was the notebooks he kept. He would write, "Now I'm awake!" And "Now I'm *really* awake." He kept being on the verge of being able to remember his situation, but then losing it.
-- http://ninthagenda.com/
for the movie "Memento".
I am sure that this man's misfortune has provided the rest of us a great opportunity to benefit form the research that has been performed on him to date, and possible further gains with his brian now (or soon to be) directly accessible to scientific research.
But I do wonder how a man who was unable to create new memories (or at least had great difficulty in this area) would be able to take in what is going on around him and give informed consent to offer his brain for further study after his passing.
So when we see this article duped next week, now we'll know why?
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Verbing weirds language :-(
Looking down from Heaven, Gustav Molaison was surprised to learn people remembered him.
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The most important contribution of H.M. is helping pin down the fact that for Episodic memory, the Medial Temporal Lobe is critical. From there a whole lot of work has been done pinning down the sub regions of the Medial Temporal Lobe with memory function:
The hippocampus: CA1 CA3 and dentate gyrus, is important for associating memory traces with contexts. The surrounding cortices important for making global assessments of the familiarity of a memory trace. Look up Professor Andrew Yonelinas at his UC Davis website for some current reviews of Recollection and Familiarity processes.
A Good Troll is better than a Bad Human.
I find this stuff fascinating. Oliver Sacks, who has researched this condition, wrote a lengthy article about Clive Wearing, who is another person with the same condition as H.M.
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
He will be remembered.
Oh hey. A cool comment box.
I would have thought that heaven would be more entertaining than scrolling through stories on Slashdot.
They have to supply the weed.
One of the best ways to explore motor control retention is to practice drumming. It is uncanny (and fascinating) how you can conquer a pattern requiring new and unfamiliar coordination with some proficiency, sleep, and the next day be much more capable (to the point of it often being trivial) of reproducing it. I think if more people understood just how easily the mind can be developed, we'd have a whole lot more proactive people in society. Stuff like this would be great for teaching kids confidence in their own abilities.
I record my sleeptalking
As long as you remember Sammy Jenkis you'll be fine.
Seems to me Science could be dedicating itself to more practical applications, like why some young women are unable to form new mammaries.
A very good friend of mine hit her head, and had amnesia for about 5 days. She didn't know anyone's name, for example, including her own. Her parents and boyfriend were strangers. We took her to the pool for morning workout (we were both on the swim team). She says that she swam to the opposite wall, and remembers thinking "I don't know what I'm supposed to do when I get to the wall. How do I turn around?" Her body promptly went through a typical perfectly executed flip turn, and as she pulled away, she thought to herself "Oh, I guess that must be what you do."
Given the severity of his case, he certainly had some sort of legal guardian who could give consent by proxy.
What truly worries me are the intermediate cases. Where is the exact point at which you can be assumed to have free will or not? Mental impairment is relative and depends on a multitude of factors, both internal, such as disease, and external, such as alcohol and drugs. That's why casinos in Vegas give you free drinks. Of course, drinking is optional, but we know so little about the workings of the brain.
I have always thought that free will is overestimated. Who knows to which extent other factors influence our decisions? When one thinks about "free will", it's usually in the form of a "soul", that is an indivisible entity, which analyzes the relevant facts and emits a decision. But we know that the threshold for making a decision depends on the ethanol content in the brain, that fact is even accepted by the law. In most legislatures it is illegal for someone to perform some tasks under the influence of alcohol.
So what about the many other physical and chemical signaling mechanisms in the brain? How can we know if our ability to make a decision has been impaired by an infection or trauma that affected our free will? The human brain is the most complex system in the known universe, the unitary soul is a philosophical assumption unsupported by facts, scientists should make an effort to get closer to the true nature of free will.
It's funny, there was just a RadioLab show on NPR on this subject. They talk about another guy who had a different type of brain damage (tumor removal) which seemed to leave him normal at first, but made him horribly indecisive. They figured out that his emotional response center was damaged. Without the emotional push to make a decision, he would never feel pressure or other emotional drive to make the decision, and couldn't do it. The emotional part is apparently just as important as the logical part in making a decision.
But the world "asshole" is pretty common. I am sure you have heard that!?
Here is an interview with Suzanne Corkin that includes taped dialog with H.M. featured at NPR.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=7584970
He sounds like a very nice person. Dr. Corkin is with the Dept. of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT.
Due to an accidental needle stick while working in surgery, I contracted hepatitis C. I didn't know it until my liver almost stopped working. The way I found out about it was being told that I'd totaled my van the day before as well as having two other accidents. In all 3 cases the police came and didn't detect any evidence of intoxication. And I wasn't intoxicated. But I was anesthetized. I was taking prescribed amounts of Ativan and Benadryl. My liver wasn't clearing them out of me, and they built up to a level that made me a fully functional zombie. I've since had another episode of amnesia caused by medication, and my liver is running at 100% now. I took Ambien, and ended up 2 days later finding out that I'd spent the previous 2 days eating all 30 days worth of the stuff, forgetting that I'd taken any previously. The first dose caused it. And it's even listed as a side effect: "can cause sleep walking with no memory of the event". It's not sleepwalking, but it's a good description anyway.
The most distressing case of amnesia I ever saw was an educational movie about a man who had been an orchestra conductor, had been in an accident, and due to the whiplash effect of the brain inside the skull, sustained brain damage in the hippocampus, where memories are formed. The best (or worst, you decide) example of what a person goes through was shown in the movie as he wrote in his journal "I have just woken up. I have only just this moment become aware." Over, and over, and over, day after day.
I once visited a man in a nursing home who had amnesia. He was due to all the thiamine (vitamin B-1) being washed out of his hippocampus by alcohol. Commonly called "wet brain", its clinical name is Wernicke-Korsakoff syndrome. It appears almost exactly like Alzheimer's. You can tell the difference by giving the person a list of words to remember. Later, ask them to recall the words, and neither can. But give the first two letters of the words, and the W-K patients can recall the words. They have implicit memory -- they can remember, but they don't know they remember. The Alzheimer's patients can't recall even having been given the list if shown the complete list later. As I spoke with this man, he frequently interrupted and asked me my name, what I do for a living, and similar questions, and asked these same questions again every couple minutes. He never once caught on to the fact that I was his son, and I didn't bother to tell him, because he wouldn't have remembered it just a few minutes later.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
This is one of those things that really is disturbing to me. It's terrible enough when your body turns on you in the form of cancer or such things, but the idea that your mind could be damaged in this type of way really spooks me.
I will shred my adversaries. Pull their eyes out just enough to turn them towards their mewing, mutilated faces. Illyria