Who Was H.M.? Inside The Mind Of The Amnesiac Who Revolutionized Neuroscience
A botched lobotomy left 27-year-old Henry Molaison unable to form new memories. This is how Molaison's personal tragedy became science’s gain.
By Suzanne Corkin Posted 05.29.2013 at 10:30 am
My friend’s father was a neurosurgeon. As a child, I had no idea what a neurosurgeon did. Years later, when I was a graduate student in the Department of Psychology at McGill University, this man reentered my life. While reading articles on memory in medical journals, I came across a report by a doctor who had performed a brain operation to cure a young man’s intractable epilepsy. The operation caused the patient to lose his capacity to establish new memories. The doctor who coauthored the article was my friend’s father, William Beecher Scoville. The patient was Henry.
This childhood connection to Henry’s neurosurgeon made reading about the “amnesic patient, H.M.” more compelling. Later, when I joined Brenda Milner’s laboratory at the Montreal Neurological Institute, Henry’s case fell into my lap. For my PhD thesis, I was able to test him in 1962 when he came to Milner’s lab for scientific study. She had been the first psychologist to test Henry after his operation, and her 1957 paper with Scoville, describing Henry’s operation and its awful consequences, revolutionized the science of memory.
I was trying to expand the scientific understanding of Henry’s amnesia by examining his memory through his sense of touch, his somatosensory system. My initial investigation with him was focused and brief, lasting one week. After I moved to MIT, however, Henry’s extraordinary value as a research participant became clear to me, and I went on to study him for the rest of his life, forty-six years. Since his death, I have dedicated my work to linking fifty-five years of rich behavioral data to what we will learn from his autopsied brain.
When I first met Henry, he told me stories about his early life. I could instantly connect with the places he was talking about and feel a sense of his life history. Several generations of my family lived in the Hartford area: my mother attended Henry’s high school, and my father was raised in the same neighborhood where Henry lived before and after his operation. I was born in the Hartford Hospital, the same hospital where Henry’s brain surgery was performed. With all these intersections in our backgrounds and experiences, it was interesting that when I would ask him whether we had met before, he typically replied, “Yes, in high school.” I can only speculate as to how Henry forged the connection between his high-school experience and me. One possibility is that I resembled someone he knew back then; another is that during his many visits to MIT for testing, he gradually built up a sense of familiarity for me and filed this representation among his high-school memories.
Henry was famous, but did not know it. His striking condition had made him the subject of scientific research and public fascination. For decades, I received requests from the media to interview and videotape him. Each time I told him how special he was, he could momentarily grasp, but not retain, what I had said.
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http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2013-05/who-was-hm-inside-mind-worlds-most-famous-amnesiac