Henry Gustav Molaison; A Treasure for the Scientific Community
Henry Gustav Molaison was one of the most famous people who suffered from amnesia. He died in 2008, but his story is very impressive, as he was for a very long period of time one of the most important people in the scientific community.
He underwent an operation in 1953, as he suffered from seizures and he wanted to take care of that problem. The operation did not occur as it should have, and he developed profound amnesia because of it. From a perfectly normal person he ended up being a person who could only remember his name, his whereabouts, the stock market crash from 1929, and World War II. He could no longer form new memories, and his older ones were erased with the exception of the ones I have just enumerated. He lived 55 years after the surgery, and everything he did after the incident, he did it for the first time, every time. When he ate something, when he drank something, he experienced the process as being something done for the first time. The brain scientists considered him to be one of the most important patients in the domain, and for about 50 years they did numerous tests on him.
The brain scientists were able to find out numerous things about the memory, learning, physical dexterity, human identity, thanks to him. He died when he was 82 years old from a respiratory failure. The incident happened when he was 27 years old, and since then he came in the aid of the neuroscientists. After it happened, he lived with his parents, and then when his parents died, he moved with some relatives. When they died as well, he was put in an institution. Surprisingly enough, his personality was not changed, and neither was his intellect. He remained the same old guy with the exception that he could no longer remember about his past, and he could no longer remember the new things either. He lived his life in the moment, because that was the only option for him.
Dr. Thomas Carew, who is a neuroscientist at the University of California, Irvine, and also the president of the Society for Neuroscience, is convinced that when H.M lost his memory, he lost a certain part of his personality with it. He was a victim of the times he lived in, because if the incident would have happened nowadays, maybe the doctors could have helped him more than they were able to do it back then. The fact is that neuroscience was very different back then than it is nowadays. First of all, the technology has evolved a lot in comparison to that period, and second, this branch of science has more money for research than it did back then. When he was a child a bicycle rider hit him, and as a result he hit his head against the concrete. Because of the medical limitations, the doctors were not able to analyze what happened inside of his brain, and that might have triggered a series of undesirable processes.
He started to develop very serious seizures after the accident, and the doctors had no idea why. They were very limited when it came to understanding the processes which go inside in the mind, and they did not realize that the accident was related to the seizures. His situation got worse and worse, and by the time he was 18 years old he developed very severe seizures, and blacked out very often. He could no longer earn a living because of his condition. In order to get rid of this problem he went to Dr. William Beecher Scoville, who was a neurosurgeon at Hartford Hospital. Dr. Scovill tried numerous things in order to solve the problem, but when none of them was successful, he decided that the best thing would be to remove certain tissues from the brain, the ones he considered to be responsible for all the seizures and the problems he developed. The surgery was very complicated, and it is complicated even nowadays. The surgeon had to cut into the hippocampus, which is an areas located deep in the brain, and to remove certain tissues from that area. That was the surgery which changed H.M forever.
Dr. Scoville was panicked by what just happened, and he decided to ask Dr. Wilder Penfield of McGill University, and Dr. Brenda Milner of the same university for help. The two had more knowledge in the domain than he did, as they worked with numerous patients that suffered from profound amnesia. Dr. Milner was very involved in the case, as she often came from Canada in order to subject Henry Molaison to certain memory tests. These tests were very important for the scientific community, because they helped the scientists learn more things about the way in which memory and learning happens. Dr. Milner is now a professor of cognitive neuroscience at the Montreal Neurological Institute and McGill University, and she remembers that he was very cooperative and that he was willing to try everything in order to get rid of the problem. She also remembers that she had to introduce herself every time she visited him.
During those times most of the scientists believed that the memory was located all over the brain, as they did not know that only certain regions of the brain were responsible with the memory. They had no idea that certain hits and concussion could alter one’s memory. Even after the surgery which changed him, there were many neuroscientists who believed that he lost his memory because for different reasons and not because of the surgery. Dr. Milner said that the doctors could not believe that the surgery was the reason why he lost his memory, because as I said, during those times it was believed that the entire brain is responsible with storing memory. Their conceptions changed in 1962 thanks to the collaboration between Dr. Milner and H.M. The two managed to prove that H.M still had certain intact memory. She asked him to solve a puzzle on paper, and he managed to do it each and every time, even though he could not remember that he did it before.
Each and every time he did the task he got better at it, which meant that even if he could not remember that he did it, a certain region of the brain remembered it. Thanks to those experiments, the scientists realized that there are two different ways in which the brain remembers the memories. We can remember names, faces, names, phone numbers, and so on, thanks to the declarative memory. The hippocampus is the organ where these memories are stored, and that was the area where the doctor performed surgery on him. We learn other things with the aid of other brain systems. We do not forget how to ride a bike even if we did not do it for tens of years, and the reason for that are because of the motor learning skills we posses. Dr. Milner remembers that the entire community was changed thanks to the discoveries she made, and she said that during those times most of the brain scientists wanted to analyze amnesia patients.
She discovered that since he did not have the hippocampus, H.M could not remember the new things for more than 20 seconds. After 20 seconds or so, he would forget what he learned, but those 20 seconds proved that his short term memory was still there somewhere in the brain. Most of the scientists from our days believe that the scientific community has changed thanks to the discoveries made by Dr. Milner. Thanks to her discoveries they started analyzing the two different types of memories, understanding that each of them has a different function. When he lived with his parents and relatives, H.M spent most of his days doing very simple things such as mowing the lawn, watching TV, making lunch, and so on. He remembered how to do those things because he knew how to do them before the operation. He also understood that he was doing the community a great service, but he would not understand how. He could always remember certain things from his childhood, but the memories were very brief, and they were very rare.
If you have seen the movies “Memento” and “50 First Dates”, he was similar to the way in which those characters were; in fact Drew Barrymore’s character is based on him. Dr. Milner said that despite of his condition, he was a very charming person, very extrovert, who would often make jokes and laugh and the jokes the other persons made. Suzanne Corkin, who is a neuroscientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, collaborated with him during his last years, and she often checked on him to see how he was doing. She even wrote a book about him, called “A Lifetime Without Memory.” She considers that his death was a huge loss, both from a person point of view, as well as from a scientific point of view.
