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On September 1st, 1953,
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William Scoville used a hand crank
and a cheap drill saw
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to bore into a young man's skull,
cutting away vital pieces of his brain
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and sucking them out through a metal tube.
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But this wasn't a scene from a horror film
or a gruesome police report.
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Dr. Scoville was one of the most
renowned neurosurgeons of his time,
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and the young man was Henry Molaison,
the famous patient known as "H.M.",
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whose case provided amazing insights
into how our brains work.
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As a boy, Henry had cracked
his skull in an accident
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and soon began having seizures, blacking out
and losing control of bodily functions.
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After enduring years of frequent episodes,
and even dropping out of high school,
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the desperate young man
had turned to Dr. Scoville,
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a daredevil known for risky surgeries.
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Partial lobotomies had been used
for decades to treat mental patients
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based on the notion that
mental functions were strictly localized
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to corresponding brain areas.
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Having successfully used them
to reduce seizures in psychotics,
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Scoville decided to remove
H.M.'s hippocampus,
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a part of the limbic system
that was associated with emotion
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but whose function was unknown.
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At first glance,
the operation had succeeded.
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H.M.'s seizures virtually disappeared,
with no change in personality,
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and his IQ even improved.
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But there was one problem:
His memory was shot.
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Besides losing most of his memories
from the previous decade,
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H.M. was unable to form new ones,
forgetting what day it was,
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repeating comments,
and even eating multiple meals in a row.
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When Scoville informed another expert,
Wilder Penfield, of the results,
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he sent a Ph.D student named Brenda Milner
to study H.M. at his parents' home,
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where he now spent his days
doing odd chores,
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and watching classic movies
for the first time, over and over.
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What she discovered through
a series of tests and interviews
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didn't just contribute greatly
to the study of memory.
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It redefined what memory even meant.
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One of Milner's findings shed light
on the obvious fact
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that although H.M. couldn't form new memories,
he still retained information
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long enough from moment to moment
to finish a sentence or find the bathroom.
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When Milner gave him a random number,
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he managed to remember it
for fifteen minutes
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by repeating it to himself constantly.
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But only five minutes later,
he forgot the test had even taken place.
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Neuroscientists had though of memory
as monolithic,
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all of it essentially the same
and stored throughout the brain.
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Milner's results were not only the first
clue for the now familiar distinction
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between short-term and long-term memory,
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but show that each uses
different brain regions.
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We now know that memory formation
involves several steps.
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After immediate sensory data is temporarily
transcribed by neurons in the cortex,
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it travels to the hippocampus,
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where special proteins work to strengthen
the cortical synaptic connections.
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If the experience was strong enough,
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or we recall it periodically
in the first few days,
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the hippocampus then transfers the memory
back to the cortex for permanent storage.
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H.M.'s mind could form
the initial impressions,
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but without a hippocampus
to perform this memory consolidation,
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they eroded,
like messages scrawled in sand.
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But this was not the
only memory distinction Milner found.
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In a now famous experiment,
she asked H.M. to trace a third star
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in the narrow space between
the outlines of two concentric ones
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while he could only see
his paper and pencil through a mirror.
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Like anyone else performing such
an awkward task for the first time,
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he did horribly.
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But surprisingly, he improved over
repeated trials,
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even though he had no memory
of previous attempts.
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His unconscious motor centers remembered
what the conscious mind had forgotten.
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What Milner had discovered was that the
declarative memory of names, dates and facts
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is different from the procedural memory
of riding a bicycle or signing your name.
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And we now know that procedural memory
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relies more on the basal ganglia
and cerebellum,
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structures that were intact in H.M.'s brain.
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This distinction between "knowing that"
and "knowing how"
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has underpinned all memory research since.
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H.M. died at the age of 82 after
a mostly peaceful life in a nursing home.
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Over the years, he had been examined
by more than 100 neuroscientists,
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making his the most
studied mind in history.
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Upon his death, his brain was
preserved and scanned
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before being cut into over 2000
individual slices
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and photographed to form a digital map
down to the level of individual neurons,
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all in a live broadcast
watched by 400,000 people.
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Though H.M. spent most of his life
forgetting things,
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he and his contributions
to our understanding of memory
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will be remembered for
generations to come.
Naoko Fujii
Hi, I think there is a typo:
2:38 though --> thought