For other science/biology geeks, H.M.'s brain webcam

[SallyMander]

Henry Molaison, probably the world's most famous and well-studied amnesiac, passed away last year and donated his brain to the Brain Observatory in San Diego. They are currently slicing his brain into 2600 sections of only 70 microns wide! And you can watch it all live on the web:

http://thebrainobservatory.ucsd.edu/hm_live.php


Here is an excerpt from a CNN article with more info about "H.M", as he was known in the scientific literature:

The exciting part comes Thursday night as scientists probe deeper into the part of the brain that had been removed more than 50 years ago, causing the patient's memory abnormalities, he said. The procedure will reveal more about Molaison's brain than a high-resolution MRI scan could, said Suzanne Corkin, professor of behavioral neuroscience at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who studied and worked with Molaison since 1962.

Annese likened the exploration of Molaison's brain to the search for the formation of colors in an impressionistic painting. If you look at a very small section of the painting up close, you see that many different colors together form the pink streaks that are visible when you step back and look at the whole thing, he said.

Molaison, born in 1926, had been suffering epileptic seizures since childhood, and underwent an operation in 1953 remove the part of the brain doctors believed were causing the seizures. They took out much of the hippocampus, a horseshoe-shaped structure that plays a major part in long-term memory.

The result was that, after the surgery, the patient could not form new memories that lasted more than 20 or 30 seconds, Corkin said. The operation did, however, succeed in reducing his seizures, and "he paid a high price for that benefit," she said.

Corkin first encountered Molaison in 1962, when she was a graduate student at the Montreal Neurological Institute at McGill University. As part of her thesis project, she studied him and two other patients who had had brain surgery to treat epilepsy, with no idea that Molaison would become so important in scientific research.

http://us.cnn.com/2009/HEALTH/12/03/brain.observatory.h.m.amnesia/index.html

[Flaneur]

1. Cool. Brain slices. n/t

[SallyMander]

2. Brain kick!

They are still going!

[Soylent Brice]

3. that's awesome.

this will be huge progress in developing better neural nets, and ultimately creating better intelligent machines.

thanks for the find.