Amnesia in Singular Case Studies and the Experiments Developed Thereof

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Memory storage in the human brain is one of the greatest mysteries of neuroscience. Knowing how and where the brain stores our memories is a much sought after piece of information. Computer scientists want to know so they can make better memory storage devices, philosophers want to know so they can better hypothesize whether or not the mind is separate from the brain, and neuroscientists want to know so they can eradicate, or at least alleviate, amnesia. There are two particularly famous amnesiacs, known as HM and EP, who, in efforts to better understand their condition, scientists developed new tests and procedures to evaluate brain function and attempt to determine what parts of the brain are responsible for memory. The purpose of this work is to explain the conditions of HM and EP and to examine how these cases contributed to the exploration of memory storage and disorders.
HM was riding his bike one day at the age of nine, when he had an accident and hit his head. His accident caused a series of epileptic seizures that started mild and relatively far between, but got increasingly intense and more often. It got to the point that these seizures "were so disturbing that he was no longer able to function" (Rudy 238). When he was 27, HM underwent surgery at the hand of Dr. William Scoville. Dr. Scoville drilled a hole above each of HM's eyes, and "lifted the front of HM's brain… while a metal straw sucked out most of the hippocampus, along with much of the surrounding medial temporal lobes" (Foer 78-9). This procedure alleviated the epilepsy almost entirely, but it was soon discovered that HM's memory was permanently damaged. Dr. Brenda Milner determined that the surgery caused anteriograde amnesia. HM couldn't form...

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...task to evaluate the extent of HM's anteriograde amnesia. She had HM trace a star shape on a piece of paper in front of a mirror, while only being able to see the star in the mirror. The first day of trials, he made many mistakes, just as anyone first attempting a task with the amount of hand-eye coordination that this experiment requires. Between each trial, when he was asked if he had performed this task before, he stated that he hadn't, because he couldn't remember doing it. But by the end of the first day, his results had improved significantly. On the second day he did even better, and on each of the 10 trials performed on the third day HM made almost zero mistakes (Rudy, The Neurobiology of Learning and Memory). This shows that while HM had lost the function of his episodic memory system, he was still capable of "acquiring a new motor skill" (Rudy, 239).

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