Exploration of HM

THE MOST STUDIED BRAIN IN HUMAN HISTORY

Our friend Henry

When you are complete with your brochure here is our next assignment.

Your job is to find out everything there is to know about the issues surrounding the memory of a man named Henry Molaison.

Answer the following questions and send me an email with your response:

1. What was wrong with Henry’s memory?

2. What were the circumstances leading up to his circumstances?

3. What part of his brain was removed? Explain the function of this part.

4. What has the world of psychology learned from Henry’s brain?

5. What is a grandma seizure? Explain how they can be debilitating.

6. Explain how there were some types of memory that Henry could create but others he could not.

ALSO: Pick one interesting thing you came across in your inquiry into HM and tell me about it.

Type up your responses and email me what you found:

Robert.rhone@nhps.net

Here is a link to the reading we used in class today to get some in depth information about HM:

Nova interview with Suzanne Corkin


Henry's obituary:

Henry Molaison

Epileptic who became a medical and scientific cause célèbre.

Henry Molaison, outside his family home in East Hartford, Connecticut, taken in the 1970s 

6:39PM GMT 04 Jan 2009

Henry Molaison, who has died aged 82, was known to medical students throughout the world as "Patient HM", and was the most-studied individual in the history of brain science.

In 1953 Molaison underwent an experimental operation on his brain to cure the epilepsy from which he had suffered as a result of being knocked over by a cyclist when he was nine. He woke up having lost the ability to form new memories, a condition known as profound amnesia.

At the time of the surgery, which involved the removal of much of his temporal lobe, including the hippocampus, the study of memory was mostly limited to psychoanalysis, and little was known of the physical processes involved. When word spread of a patient who had suffered localised brain damage resulting in extreme memory loss, scientists queued up to research the nature of his amnesia. Molaison remained lucid, and willingly agreed to be a guinea pig. Over the next half century he participated in hundreds of studies.

He could remember events before the operation – such as hiking along the Mohawk trail – but from then on every time he met a friend or took a walk, it was as if he were doing so for the first time. It was not that he could not form memories at all. He had no problems with language, could get the point of jokes, and was able to hold memory in storage for short periods in order to carry out such tasks as dialling a phone number which had just been read out to him. He could form new memories for procedures – he was trained to trace the shape of a star by looking in a mirror, and over several sessions he got better at the task.

Yet he could not convert short-term memories of events into permanent storage. His trainers had to introduce themselves at the beginning of every session, and despite his growing dexterity he never remembered drawing the star from one time to the next. For 50 years he guessed his own age at about 30 and was always surprised when he looked in the mirror. He relived his grief over the death of his mother every time he heard about it.

Studies of Patient HM led to the discovery that the hippocampus is required for the formation of conscious, long-term memories, but not for unconscious, long-term skill memories, memory maintenance and retrieval, or short-term recall. Perhaps more importantly, he demonstrated that memory has a biological basis.

Henry Gustav Molaison was born on February 26 1926 near Hartford, Connecticut, and was educated at East Hartford High School. He had his first epileptic fit on his 16th birthday and by 1953 he was having as many as 11 a week and was unable to hold down his job as a mechanic. At the time there were no effective treatments for epilepsy, so he was referred to William Scoville, a surgeon at Hartford Hospital. Scoville reasoned, correctly, that epileptic seizures are caused by violent electrical impulses that start in one area of the brain then spread to others. He felt that if he removed the part of the brain where the impulses originated, it should be possible to cure the epilepsy. As it happened, he did cure the epilepsy.

After the operation, Molaison was cared for by his parents and later in a nursing home. He could order his days by drawing on what he could remember from his first 27 years and he enjoyed doing crosswords and watching detective series on television.

But since he could never remember a person from one 10-minute period to the next, he could never make friends, and he was constantly worried that he might have done something wrong: "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."

Henry Molaison died on December 2. His brain has been preserved for future study.