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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..."
for the movie "Memento".
I think the guy you mean is Clive Wearing. Whenever showed his earlier writings, he denied being responsible for them. Over time his caretakers learned to always speak to him in terms of the immediate present, and to never refer to their past time together.
Author has been a verb (and a noun) since at least 1596 (oed).
The creator of this post (Jacob Smith) hereby releases it, and all of his other posts, into the public domain.
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.
New Topic:
H.M. learned how to solve the Tower of Hanoi (documented by decreasing time to solve) but denied ever seeing the Tower of Hanoi before.
This is an example of some evidence that distinguished between semantic(facts) and episodic(event) memory systems.
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.
Give it up, I'm 50 and have known about it since high school.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Yes, H.M. was aware of his condition, which is typical of temporal lobe amnesia. (Patients who also have damage to the frontal lobes as in Korsakoff's syndrome are often unaware of their memory deficit, a form of anosognosia.)
One of the quotes from H.M. I always read in my neuroscience classes:
"Right now I'm wondering, have I done or said anything amiss? You see, at this moment everything looks clear to me, but what happened just before? That's what worries me. It's like waking from a dream; I just don't remember.... Every day is alone in itself, whatever enjoyment I've had, whatever sorrow."
RIP, Henry.