Secrets of the Human Body by Chris van Tulleken

Author:Chris van Tulleken
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers

Understanding the reasons for childhood amnesia is still beyond us. And we still don’t understand the physical mechanism that allows our brains to record something at the age of 3 that will still be accessible to you even a century later – the connections and proteins that sometimes enable us to see, hear and feel a few moments from the first few years at the end of our lives. But the recent explosion in neuroscience has allowed us to begin unpicking the details of how an autobiographical memory is laid down.

Much of this understanding began to emerge in the last century by studying the behaviour of people who had survived serious brain damage. Throughout the twentieth century advances in trauma medicine and antibiotics combined to transform the survival rates of patients after head injury and stroke. At the same time surgeons were also pushing the boundaries, although often with ill effect, allowing us to gain specific insights into the function of different parts of the brain. One of the most famous and revealing cases of this type was the strange story of a man called Henry Molaison.

THE MAN WHO FORGOT HIMSELF

Henry Molaison was born in Manchester, Connecticut, in 1926 and died 82 years later just a few miles upstate from his place of birth. His was a generation that lived through an endless stream of extraordinary events, from global war to seeing a man walk on the moon, and yet Molaison experienced these events in a way that intrigued and puzzled neuroscientists for decades. From the age of 10 Molaison suffered from increasingly severe epileptic seizures. Triggered, perhaps, by a bicycle accident a couple of years earlier, by his late teens he was struggling with the severity and frequency of the seizures as they impacted more and more on his ability to lead a normal life. With high doses of anti-convulsant medication having little effect, he was eventually referred to the care of William Scoville, a neurosurgeon at Hartford Hospital, Connecticut. Investigations by Scoville led him to conclude that the epilepsy was localised to the temporal lobes of Molaison’s brain and, as was the growing surgical fashion at the time, the decision was taken to perform an experimental procedure known as a bilateral medial temporal lobe resection – in other words they would attempt to control the epilepsy by cutting out a substantial part of Henry’s brain.

On 1 September 1953 Scoville opened up Molaison’s skull and dissected out several deep-seated structures on both sides of his brain, including his hippocampi, amygdala and entorhinal cortex. On awakening, the primary goal of the surgery appeared to have been successful. Molaison’s epilepsy had been abated by the operation but the side effects of having such fundamental parts of his brain removed were devastating. From the time he woke up in the recovery room of Hartford Hospital, it was as if Henry Molaison’s memory was frozen in time. Unable to commit any new information to his long-term memory, the events of the day were forgotten almost as fast as they occurred.

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