R.I.P. to H.M.
For those of you who study psychology and/or neuroscience (or just though the movie "Momento" was cool and wondered if that was possible), H.M. died recently.
H.M. suffered from severe epilepsy from the time he was young. As a treatment, they removed part of his temporal lobe and ended up removing part of his hippocampus. The hippocampus is responsible for consolidating long-term, explicit memories (memories of events and facts). The result was that he developed anterograde amnesia, the inability to create new long-term, explicit memories (as opposed to retrograde amnesia, which is the inability to remember events from the past). I learned about him in all three of my classes this semester. He is one of the most famous patients in the history of neuroscience and has helped us to understand so much about memory and learning.
Hats off to H.M.
Here's an article about him: www.nytimes.com/2008/12/05/us/05hm.html
H.M. suffered from severe epilepsy from the time he was young. As a treatment, they removed part of his temporal lobe and ended up removing part of his hippocampus. The hippocampus is responsible for consolidating long-term, explicit memories (memories of events and facts). The result was that he developed anterograde amnesia, the inability to create new long-term, explicit memories (as opposed to retrograde amnesia, which is the inability to remember events from the past). I learned about him in all three of my classes this semester. He is one of the most famous patients in the history of neuroscience and has helped us to understand so much about memory and learning.
Hats off to H.M.
Here's an article about him: www.nytimes.com/2008/12/05/us/05hm.html