when did hm die

by Sterling Casper Published 3 years ago Updated 2 years ago

Henry Gustav Molaison (February 26, 1926 – December 2, 2008), known widely as H.M., was an American who had a bilateral medial temporal lobectomy to surgically resect the anterior two thirds of his hippocampi, parahippocampal cortices, entorhinal cortices, piriform cortices, and amygdalae in an attempt to cure his ...

Is H.M. dead?

December 2, 2008Henry Molaison / Date of death

How did Patient HM die?

Respiratory insufficiencyHenry Molaison / Cause of deathOn Tuesday evening at 5:05, Henry Gustav Molaison — known worldwide only as H. M., to protect his privacy — died of respiratory failure at a nursing home in Windsor Locks, Conn.

Why did H.M. have surgery?

In an attempt to control his seizures, H. M. underwent brain surgery to remove his hippocampus and amygdala. As a result of his surgery, H. M's seizures decreased, but he could no longer form new memories or remember the prior 11 years of his life.

What type of amnesia did H.M. have?

And, it worked. The seizures abated, but afterwards Molaison was left with permanent amnesia. He could remember some things — scenes from his childhood, some facts about his parents, and historical events that occurred before his surgery — but he was unable to form new memories.

What was removed from H.M. brain?

At age 27, H.M., whose real name was Henry Molaison, underwent an experimental surgical treatment for his debilitating epilepsy. His surgeon removed the medial temporal lobe, including a structure called the hippocampus. Thereafter, H.M. was unable to form new memories.

What happened to H.M.'s brain after he died?

On the one-year anniversary of H.M.'s death, Annese's team froze his entire brain as a single block and began a 53-hour process of cutting it into some 2,400 super-thin slices. “I didn't sleep for three days,” Annese says. He had a team of students that took shifts to help him — and to make sure he stayed awake.

What did Patient HM prove?

The findings from H.M. established the fundamental principle that memory is a distinct cerebral function, separable from other perceptual and cognitive abilities, and identified the medial aspect of the temporal lobe as important for memory.

What is special about Jake's memory?

- Jake can remember 80% of everything from 7 years old and on (he cannot forget any details).

What was removed from patient HM brain?

What part of the brain did Patient HM have removed?

medial temporal lobeMolaison (H.M.), an epileptic patient whose amnesia ensued unexpectedly following a bilateral surgical ablation of medial temporal lobe structures, including the hippocampus.

Which of the following was a spared memory ability for patient HM after his brain damage?

Which of the following was a spared memory ability for Patient H.M. after his brain damage? perceptual learning. Your ability to recognize a series of tones, such as the opening notes of "The Star Spangled Banner," is an instance of ________ that likely involves the ________.

What problems did H.M. encounter following the surgery?

Henry's memory loss was far from simple. Not only could he make no new conscious memories after his operation, he also suffered a retrograde memory loss (a loss of memories prior to brain damage) for an 11-year period before his surgery.

What happened to Molaison after he had his surgery?

After the surgery, which was partially successful in controlling his seizures, Molaison developed severe anterograde amnesia: although his working memory and procedural memory were intact, he could not commit new events to his explicit memory. According to some scientists, he was impaired in his ability to form new semantic knowledge.

Why did Molaison acquire the floor plan?

Regarding the underlying neural structures, Corkin (2002) argues that Molaison's ability to acquire the floor plan is due to partly intact structures of his spatial processing network (e.g., the posterior part of his parahippocampal gyrus ). In addition to his topographical memory, Molaison showed some learning in a picture memorization-recognition task, as well as in a famous faces recognition test, but in the latter only when he was provided with a phonemic cue. Molaison's positive performance in the picture recognition task might be due to spared parts of his ventral perirhinal cortex .

What did Molaison do at the end of his life?

Near the end of his life, Molaison regularly filled in crossword puzzles. He was able to fill in answers to clues that referred to pre-1953 knowledge. For post-1953 information he was able to modify old memories with new information. For instance, he could add a memory about Jonas Salk by modifying his memory of polio.

Why was Molaison important?

What was Molaison's job?

In 1953, Molaison was referred to William Beecher Scoville, a neurosurgeon at Hartford Hospital.

What happened to Henry Molaison?

Henry Molaison was born on February 26, 1926 in Manchester, Connecticut, and experienced intractable epilepsy that has sometimes been attributed to a bicycle accident at the age of seven. He had minor or partial seizures for many years, and then major or tonic-clonic seizures following his 16th birthday.

Which lobes did Scoville remove?

On September 1, 1953, Scoville removed Molaison's medial temporal lobes on both hemispheres including the hippocampus and most of the amygdala and entorhinal cortex, the major sensory input to the hippocampus.

What part of the brain is removed from H.M.?

That’s because H.M.’s surgery removed not only parts of the hippocampus, but the entire ‘entorhinal cortex, ’ a region that connects the hippocampus to the cortex, or outer layers of the brain. In animal models, Witter says, “removal of entorhinal inputs generally lead to striking changes” in the hippocampus.

Why did H.M. have brain surgery?

In 1953, at age 27, he underwent experimental brain surgery to treat the terrible seizures that had plagued him since childhood. The seizures quieted after surgeon William Beecher Scoville removed pieces of the temporal lobes above his ears — including, notably, large parts of the hippocampus — but it came at the cost of permanent amnesia. For the rest of his life, H.M. could only hold on to memories of events that happened before his surgery.

Where did Annese take his brain?

Then Annese took it to California, to his lab at The Brain Observatory at the University of California, San Diego. Over the next 10 months, Annese gradually added sucrose to the buffer, creating a cryoprotectant that would allow the entire brain to be frozen without forming tissue-damaging ice crystals.

How long did it take to cut H.M.'s brain?

On the one-year anniversary of H.M.’s death, Annese’s team froze his entire brain as a single block and began a 53-hour process of cutting it into some 2,400 super-thin slices. “I didn’t sleep for three days,” Annese says. He had a team of students that took shifts to help him — and to make sure he stayed awake. “There was always one person next to me, and if I looked like I was phasing out or missing a slice, the code word was ‘prosciutto’,” says Annese, who is Italian. “It was probably the most engaging, most exciting thing I’ve ever done.”

What is missing from H.M.'s brain?

If you use the arrows to zoom in to the two small seahorse-like regions at the bottom of the slice (see the boxes on the picture at right), you’ll be looking at what was left of H.M.’s hippocampus. Although most emphasis on H.M. has focused on his missing hippocampus, brain-imaging studies have shown since the late 1990s that he actually retained about 50 percent of this region. The new resource confirms this, and also allows researchers to look closely at individual hippocampal cells, providing a fine-grained molecular view that is not possible with brain imaging.

How many people watched the Annese procedure?

Annese’s team live-streamed and Tweeted the entire procedure, and he says some 400,000 people tuned in to watch. In the end, just two slices were damaged while cutting.

How long did the cadaver stay in the MRI machine?

The cadaver spent the next nine hours inside of an MRI machine, getting scanned every which way. Meanwhile, on the other side of the country, neuroanatomist Jacopo Annese rushed to the San Diego airport and boarded a red-eye flight to Boston. After landing, and pounding a few cups of coffee, he went to the hospital to join neuropathologist Matthew ...

What did Henry Molaison teach us?

Henry Molaison (HM) taught us about memory by losing his.

Did Scoville have a successful hippocampal surgery?

The operation was successful in that it significantly reduced Henry's seizures, but it left him with a dense memory loss. When Scoville realized his patient had become amnesic, he referred him to the eminent neurosurgeon Dr. Wilder Penfield and neuropsychologist Dr. Brenda Milner of Montreal Neurological Institute (MNI), who assessed him in detail. Up until then, it had not been known that the hippocampus was essential for making memories, and that if we lose both of them we will suffer a global amnesia. Once this was realized, the findings were widely publicized so that this operation to remove both hippocampi would never be done again.

What did Penfield and Milner discover about Henry?

Penfield and Milner had already been conducting memory experiments on other patients and they quickly realized that Henry's dense amnesia, his intact intelligence, and the precise neurosurgical lesions made him the perfect experimental subject.

How many slices of Henry's brain were dissected?

After Henry's death, his brain was dissected into 2,000 slices and digitized as a three-dimensional brain map that could be searched by zooming in from the whole brain to individual neurons. Thus, his tragically unique brain has been preserved for posterity.

Who is Jenni Ogden?

Jenni Ogden, Ph.D., clinical neuropsychologist and author of Trouble in Mind, taught at the University of Auckland.

When did Henry die?

Henry died on December 2, 2008, at the age of 82. Until then, he was known to the world only as "HM," but on his death his name was revealed. A man with no memory is vulnerable, ...

Which part of the brain is involved in episodic memory?

Working memory tasks usually activate the pre-frontal cortex and a few other brain regions which were intact in H.M. The hippocampus is mainly involved in the encoding of spatial and episodic memory, although it does a lot of other things as well.

What is the lobotomy of H.M.?

The Lobotomy Of Patient H.M: A Personal Tragedy And Scientific Breakthrough Known as Patient H.M. to the medical community, Henry Molaison was lobotomized — and lost his ability to create memories in the process. His story is one of tragedy and scientific breakthrough.

What is the story of Henry Molaison?

Amazon. Independent Booksellers. The story of Henry Molaison is a sad one. Known as Patient H.M. to the medical community, he lost the ability to create memories after he underwent a lobotomy to treat his seizures. He did earn a place in history, though. His case taught scientists a lot about how the brain creates and stores memories.

What is lobotomy in medical terms?

He was one of the leading proponents in America of so-called psycho-surgery, which we commonly think of as lobotomy — that is, surgical treatment for mental illness. One of the things I discovered during the course of researching my book was that his sort of passion for psycho-surgery, for the lobotomy, grew out of a sort ...

How old was Henry Molaison before he was patient H.M?

Before he was Patient H.M., he was a man named Henry Molaison. He grew up in the Hartford area in Connecticut, and his story really begins when he was 8 or 9 years old, in the mid-1930s.

What were the side effects of lobotomy?

It's an open question as to why that was, but one possible answer is that the side effects of the consequences of lobotomy — tractability, passivity, docility — were in some senses viewed by certain men of that era as being almost ideal feminine characteristics. Anyway, it was a way of changing personality.

What happened to the boy who was walking home from the park?

He was walking home from the park late one night, got knocked down by a bicyclist and hit his head. And shortly after that, he began experiencing seizures.

What is fever therapy?

It's otherwise known as fever therapy, and in the early days of fever therapy, they would they would literally inject you with the malaria parasite in order to induce high fevers, which were supposed to bring about some sort of mental clarity.

Overview

Henry Gustav Molaison (February 26, 1926 – December 2, 2008), known widely as H.M., was an American who had a bilateral medial temporal lobectomy to surgically resect the anterior two thirds of his hippocampi, parahippocampal cortices, entorhinal cortices, piriform cortices, and amygdalae in an attempt to cure his epilepsy. Although the surgery was partially successful in controlling hi…

Biography

Henry Molaison was born on February 26, 1926, in Manchester, Connecticut, and experienced intractable epilepsy that has sometimes been attributed to a bicycle accident at the age of seven. He had minor or partial seizures for many years, and then major or tonic-clonic seizures following his 16th birthday. He worked for a time on an assembly line but, by the age of 27, he had become so incapacitated by his seizures, despite high doses of anticonvulsant medication, that he could …

Insights into memory formation

Molaison was influential not only for the knowledge he provided about memory impairment and amnesia, but also because it was thought his exact brain surgery allowed a good understanding of how particular areas of the brain may be linked to specific processes hypothesized to occur in memory formation. In this way, his case was taken to provide information about brain pathology, and helped to form theories of normal memory function.

Contribution to science

The study of Molaison revolutionized the understanding of the organization of human memory. It has provided broad evidence for the rejection of old theories and the formation of new theories on human memory, in particular about its processes and the underlying neural structures (cf. Kolb & Whishaw, 1996). In the following, some of the major insights are outlined.
Molaison's brain was the subject of an anatomical study funded by the Dana Foundation and the National …

Post-death controversy

On August 7, 2016, a New York Times article written by Luke Dittrich, grandson of Molaison's neurosurgeon William Beecher Scoville, raised a number of concerns about how Molaison's data and consent process had been conducted by the primary scientist investigating him, Suzanne Corkin. The article suggested that Corkin had destroyed research documents and data, and failed to obtain consent from Molaison's closest living kin. In response to the article, a group of over 20…

Notes

1. ^ The bicycle accident was initially reported to have occurred at age nine. This was subsequently corrected to age seven, to accord with clarification from H.M.'s mother.