Although study of the brain can be traced to Roman times and Galen, the doctor to the Gladiators, Neuroscience was not formally recognized until 1970. In this still-young interdisciplinary science, many of its breakthroughs can be attributed to the study of one patient, Henry Molaison, or Patient H.M. as he is known in scientific literature. As a child, H.M. had fallen off his bicycle and sustained a head injury. He began to have violent seizures. To treat these, H.M. underwent brain surgery that removed most of the temporal lobes on both sides of his brain, after which he could no longer form new memories. He retained all his childhood memories before the surgery; after, he could remember a new name or a number for a few minutes but then
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And HM’s brain continues to make contributions to our knowledge: In 2008, when H.M. died, his brain was removed and scanned repeatedly using MRI. In 2009, his brain was dissected over 53 hours into 2410 pieces, each 70 micrometers thick, in a process that was live-streamed. Each slice was then photographed and posted online. These images were stored and then used to create a three-dimensional model of H.M.’s brain that was posted online and which has provided new evidence of how the brain operates (Annese, Schenker-Ahmed et al., Nature Communications, 2014). No one could foresee the role that patient HM would play in the development of Neuroscience. Both during his lifetime and even after his death, Patient HM has been at the center of numerous significant discoveries about memory and the brain. As Neuroscience has expanded to many different disciplines with the use of various new technologies, there has been one constant among so many interdisciplinary breakthroughs; the brain of Henry Molaison, Patient
And HM’s brain continues to make contributions to our knowledge: In 2008, when H.M. died, his brain was removed and scanned repeatedly using MRI. In 2009, his brain was dissected over 53 hours into 2410 pieces, each 70 micrometers thick, in a process that was live-streamed. Each slice was then photographed and posted online. These images were stored and then used to create a three-dimensional model of H.M.’s brain that was posted online and which has provided new evidence of how the brain operates (Annese, Schenker-Ahmed et al., Nature Communications, 2014). No one could foresee the role that patient HM would play in the development of Neuroscience. Both during his lifetime and even after his death, Patient HM has been at the center of numerous significant discoveries about memory and the brain. As Neuroscience has expanded to many different disciplines with the use of various new technologies, there has been one constant among so many interdisciplinary breakthroughs; the brain of Henry Molaison, Patient