WWTBAM Bored

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/05/us/05hm.html?_r=1&hp

An amazing story. It'll remind you of the movie Momento.

Interesting article!

I was wondering (until I read the article) why you only listed his initials, like maybe he was someone so famous his initials should have been obvious to us all.

This was my field of study, back when I had one. I've read reams on this guy. Brenda Milner, the researcher from McGill, had him all sewn up as it were & wouldn't let other researchers not in her immediate chosen circle (as in someone I wrote a long, long paper for) even meet him.

He dates from the days before CAT scans & MRIs to do brain imaging; back then, as now, it really helped to know what areas of the brain of someone you were studying had been damaged & exactly how complete was the damage. But back then, if you weren't studying a surgery patient, all such conclusions had to wait for autopsy. HM was a surgery patient, with a record kept of the operated-on area locations, so was a very useful person to study.

What the article doesn't tell you is that Scoville, the operating surgeon, had no business doing this operation, because he should have already known, from surgery on a previous patient done by Wilder Penfield that the memory defect would ensue. Penfield had operated on the previous patient only on the hippocampus on one side, but it turned out that patient had defective tissue on the other side; the side operated on had been the only side working at all. Penfield was contrite about this all the rest of his life; he should have, & with subsequent patients did, anesthetize the side to be operated on in a pre-test to see it the "good side" really was good & would leave a functional patient after the damaged side hippocampus was removed.

Scoville, on the other hand, operated bilaterally on HM. Either he hadn't read the literature beforehand, or he didn't believe it. A real jerk.

It reminded me of 50 First Dates.

So what Drew Barrymore's character experienced is possible.

SportsFan68 wrote:It reminded me of 50 First Dates.

So what Drew Barrymore's character experienced is possible.

No, it was like the guy in the hospital in that film who had no short-term memory and treated everyone as if he'd just met them for the first time.