That’s the familiar version of the story, but the one presented in Luke Dittrich’s new book Patient H.M.: A Story of Memory, Madness, and Family Secrets is deeper and darker. These problems revolutionized our understanding of how memory works, and transformed Molaison into “Patient H.M.”-arguably the most famous and studied patient in the history of neuroscience. Everyone he met, every conversation he had, everything that happened to him would just evaporate from his mind. It worked, but the procedure left Molaison unable to make new long-term memories. Twenty years later, a surgeon named William Scoville tried to cure him by removing parts of his brain. At the age of seven, Henry Gustav Molaison was involved in an accident that left him with severe epilepsy.
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