The most famous neuroscience patient and test subject died last week, and the researchers who worked with him say they’ll never forget the man who never remembered them. The patient known as H.M. lost the ability to form new memories after he had brain surgery at the age of 27, and studies of his behavior taught researchers basic lessons about how memory and learning work. “He was a very gracious man, very patient, always willing to try these tasks I would give him,” [said Brenda] Milner, a professor of cognitive neuroscience. “And yet every time I walked in the room, it was like we’d never met” [The New York Times].
Henry Gustav Molaison, a Hartford [Connecticut] native, existed in relative obscurity. But as “H.M.,” the name used to disguise his identity, Molaison gained an anonymous sort of fame, a man who had been studied by more than 100 researchers and became a staple of psychology class lectures…. “I’ve been lecturing about him and teaching about him for years and years, decades, and I’ve never known his name” [Hartford Courant], says psychiatrist David Glahn. Molaison died at a Connecticut nursing home on Tuesday at the age of 82, of respiratory failure.
Molaison began having seziures after a childhood bicycle accident, and by the age of 27 they were seriously interfering with his daily life. In 1953 surgeons removed two slices of his brain and cut into a region called the hippocampus–this stopped his seizures, but also gave Molaison a form of amnesia where he could remember events from before the surgery but couldn’t form any new long-term memories.


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