Healthy Brain, Happy Life by Wendy Suzuki Read Free Book Online Page B

addressed the unusual and disturbing findings in a presentation that was to be discussed at a meeting of the American Neurological Association in Chicago in 1954.
    You might ask, what was known about the brain basis of memory in those days? In fact, the prominent theory of the time was championed by a famous Harvard psychologist named Karl Lashley, who had done a series of experiments in rats through which he tried to understand how memory was organized in the brain. He first taught the rats a maze and then systematically damaged different parts of the outer covering of their brains, or cortex, to see which area, when damaged, would lead to the most severe memory impairment for performance in the maze. What he found was that the location of the damage did not seem to make any difference. Instead he found that only when he damaged enough of the cortex did he see a memory deficit emerge. Based on these findings he concluded that memory was not localized to any particular part of the brain. Instead he believed memory was so complex that a large cortical network was involved and only when you damaged a significant part of that network would the memory system fail. This prominent view at the time made the striking memory deficits that Milner and Penfield saw even more puzzling because the memory issues they observed seemed connected to the removal or damage of specific brain regions.
    Several hundred miles away in Hartford, Connecticut, another neurosurgeon by the name of William Scoville read the abstract Penfield and Milner had submitted for the American Neurological Association conference and immediately contacted Penfield. Scoville had been treating a young man with such severe epilepsy that he, with the consent of the patient’s family, had decided to do what he referred to as a “frankly experimental operation.” Scoville removed the hippocampus and amygdala on both sides of the patient’s brain, not just one. Scoville was correct about the reduction of epileptic seizures that took place, but immediately after the patient woke up it became clear that he, like Penfield and Milner’s patients, had a profound memory deficit. He didn’t know it at the time, but Scoville’s patient (H.M.) was to become the most famous neurological patient ever studied.
    Remember, this surgery took place at the height of the era when neurosurgeons were using brain operations—such as frontal lobotomies and procedures that damaged parts of the frontal and temporal lobes—to cure various psychiatric diseases like schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. This practice is referred to as psychosurgery. It’s difficult to imagine what the mind-set was like at that time to believe it was okay to experiment with taking out parts of people’s brains, even if it was supposed to be for their own good.
    Scoville not only attended the 1954 meeting of the American Neurological Association but also presented a paper describing his patient H.M. Scoville then invited Milner to Connecticut to study patient H.M. She immediately jumped at the opportunity.
    Milner has described herself as a “noticer,” and her observations and testing of patient H.M. and nine other of Scoville’s patients helped reveal something completely radical in our understanding of how memory works in the brain. H.M. was the easiest to test and evaluate because most of Scoville’s other patients suffered from various psychiatric disorders, including schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. While she found H.M.’s intelligence to be quite high (and even improved a small amount after his surgery), he had a profound inability to remember anything that happened to him. He could not remember any of the hospital staff or doctors he came in contact with at the hospital (including Milner herself), could not find his way to the bathroom in the hospital or remember the location or address of the home his family moved to after his operation. Despite this profound inability to remember anything new,