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Martin Peteres
Martin Peteres
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Joined: 2022-08-10
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While Clive Wearing dwells on the extremes of memory dissolution, Henry Gustav Molaison—known over the years in the neuropsychological literature as simply H. M.—suffered from a surgically inflicted form of amnesia. As a child, H. M. frequently underwent intractable seizures that occurred ten or more times per day and threatened him with permanent brain damage or even death. The seizures recurred as the result of a back and forth rapid discharge from one hemisphere of the brain to the other. Neurosurgeons strongly suspected (correctly) that the discharge was ping-ponging from the hippocampus on one side of the brain to the hippocampus on the other side. As a treatment, they removed the hippocampus and the amygdala from both the right and left sides of H. M.’s brain. The operation was an easy one, as such things go, and gratifyingly successful: the seizures stopped. But new and perfidious symptoms appeared immediately after the operation.H. M. began to demonstrate a very specific type of memory difficulty. He could no longer remember what he had for breakfast, piece together why he was in the hospital, or recognize anyone he had previously met, even if the meeting occurred only a few seconds ago. His psychologist Brenda Milner tested him daily, but each day they met, H. M. could not place her or recall any of their previous meetings. Even over the short duration of a lunch break, H. M. would return for the afternoon testing and not be able to remember Milner, or their previous morning testing.A short time after his operation H. M.’s uncle died, leading to the expression of profound grief. Yet within a day or so, H. M. was speaking of the uncle as if he were still alive. When told again that his uncle was dead—had been for several months—he responded with renewed surprise and fresh grief. Despite these grave disturbances in establishing memory H. M. in contrast to Clive Wearing, maintained a serviceable memory for things that had happened in the past before his brain surgery. While Wearing suffered from both retrograde and anterograde amnesia, H. M.’s defect was largely restricted to anterograde memory loss: he couldn’t form new memories.H. M.’s personality was basically unchanged. Those who knew him before the surgery stated that it was the same H. M., but with severe memory problems. Whenever his attention was directed to one thing, he promptly forgot about what he had been doing only a moment previously. H. M. needed to scribble notes to himself to keep track of day to day events. As long as H. M. could fix his attention on one thing he could keep it in mind, but if he shifted from the immediate present, even for just a second, everything collapsed like a house of cards.I have always been somewhat curious how H. M. was able to access his past memories. They were stored within the intact neocortex, particularly the areas having to do with seeing, hearing, touching, etc., but to re-experience them, it would seem necessary for the memory tracts to interact once again with the hippocampus. But in H. M.’s case, the hippocampus on each side of the brain was missing. This is a mystery, and I mention it only to remind readers that in the event of damage, the brain’s components cannot simply be reconfigured like Lego pieces.So which of these two tragic figures would you prefer to be? Clive Wearing or H. M.? Pause here and think about what your life would be like. If forced to choose, I think most people would select H. M. (I certainly would), since he retained access to events that occurred prior to his injury. Clive Wearing, in contrast, could not access anything in his past (retrograde amnesia), nor form new memories (anterograde amnesia).


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