H.M.’s condition suggested that the hippocampus was essential for the conversion of short-term memories to long-term memories, and he became the most widely cited example in studies of the distinction between them. He could not even recognize himself in recent photos, thinking that the face in the image was some “old guy.” Yet he was able to carry on a conversation for as long as his attention was not diverted. Every time he met a scientist from MIT who was studying him regularly, she had to introduce herself again. He failed to recognize hospital staff and physicians whom he had met only minutes earlier, remembering only Scoville, whom he had known since childhood. He could not remember what he had eaten for breakfast, lunch, or supper, nor could he find his way around the hospital. H.M., as he came to be known in the medical literature (his real name was not disclosed until his death in 2008), could no longer remember anything he did. Reassurances of welcome had to be sought every moment from every look in every pair of eyes. Names no longer rose to the surface, neither histories nor endearing moments came anymore. The result, however, as the journalist Philip Hilts wrote in Memory’s Ghost (1995), was thatįrom H.M.’s moment in surgery onward, every conversation for him was without predecessors, each face vague and new. The hippocampus, located near the center of the brain, forms a part of the limbic system that directs many bodily functions, and Scoville thought that epileptic seizures could be controlled by excising much of it. Scoville removed two pieces of tissue-the left and right sides of the hippocampus-from Molaison’s brain. On September 1, 1953, William Scoville, a neurosurgeon at Hartford Hospital in Connecticut, operated on a twenty-seven-year-old man named Henry Gustav Molaison, who suffered from severe epilepsy.
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