Brain Surgery Patient Trapped in a Mental Time Warp

diverge_s writes "BrainConnection has an interesting article about a man who lives life straight out of the movie Memento. FTA: "When twenty-seven year old Henry M. entered the hospital in 1953 for radical brain surgery that was supposed to cure his epilepsy, he was hopeful that the procedure would change his life for the better. Instead, it trapped him in a mental time warp where TV is always a new invention and Truman is forever president. The removal of large sections of his temporal lobes left Henry unable to form any new personal memories, but his tragic loss revolutionized the field of psychology and made "H.M." the most-studied individual in the history of brain research.""

Not news...

[xitshsif]

"entered the hospital in 1953 for radical brain surgery"

If the most recent development was in 1953, is it still news?

Re:I never considered surgery

[bloodredsun]

Actually as someone who has just finished a PhD in Neurophysiology I feel I may be a little better placed to comment than your average /. reader

Complex partial seizures originating in the temporal lobe have one of the best success rates in epilepsy surgery, but surgery is only offered to patients whos epilepsy is medically refractive (cannot be controlled by drugs) and affects their life in such as way that they would strongly benefit from surgery. Temporal lobe epilepsy is most often caused by mesial temporal or hippocampal sclerosis, this means that that part of the brain has become scarred and shrunk and this damage is causing the seizures. So this part of the brain supports a minimal amount of function. As your seizures are probably well controlled by drugs, you would never have been offered a surgical option.

we still don't know enough about the way it works to reliably fix problems that the brain itself cannot handle.
That's correct to a certain extent, but we do know a lot more and one of them is how to avoid causing the sort of condition that HM suffers.

Re:Is there a name for what *I* have?

[awol]

Yeah, what you have is "Couldn'tgivashitaboutyou"itis :-) Seriously though, I have/had the same issue and the real reason we can't remember peoples names is because we never really cared enough about that person to bother remembering. I am not having a go at you, but it sounds a lot like what many people have. The faces are easy because we are so deeply wired to remember them. But the name thing requires conscious effort and you probably aren't bothering.

It takes a fairly major mind shift when you first meet people, but once done, it is really easy. I am not saying that you will never forget a name but quite apart from all the "memory techniques" that you can read about, all I am saying is by simply trying to remember the name it will make a huge difference. For me my limit is about 8, I can get introduced to 8 people and with a tiny effort should be able to remember them all for a while (weeks) even longer if I actually go and talk to them all in the next hour or so.

Re:Experimental brain surgery

[bloodredsun]

Modern therapies for brain disorders are often highly dangerous, extremely toxic to the rest of the body, notorious for side-effects, often addictive, and many are poorly studied with completely unknown long-term consequences

And what do you base this comment on? Modern therapies are rarely dangerous (felbamate being the only modern therapy I would have said was dangerous and that is restricted), have few side effects especially compared to their action, aren't addictive, and are very intensively studied with long term effects based on the duration of their use. Surgery can also be fantastic for those with medically refractive epilepsy and with an assessment period of about 18 months can produce effects that are superior to drugs.

I think your post is either a troll or you are really quite ignorant about epilepsy treatment. I cannot for the life of me understand why you are currently rated +3 interesting.

Disclaimer: I don't work for any drug or surgical products companies

Okay, the followup articles . . .

[drachenstern]

This article [unc.edu] talks about "What was most striking were the numerous reports of organ transplant recipients who later experienced changes in personality traits, tastes for food, music, activities and even sexual preference. Is it possible that our memories reside deep inside our bodily cells in addition to in our minds?" and was written by Leslie A. Takeuchi, BA, PTA

This article [discoveryhealth.co.uk] talks about "In the 19th century a German anatomist Leopold Auerbach observed a complex network of nerve cells in the human digestive tract. And now scientists in the US and Germany are claiming to have rediscovered this so called 'second brain' which is made up of a knot of brain nerves in the digestive tract and is believed to involve around 100 billion nerve cells - more than those held in the spinal cord." and is really just a blurb but quite interesting food for thought. It comes from the Discovery Channel's website, since they do a lot of Health programming. (no puns intended, thanks, altho it is quite funny)

This article [skepticalcommunity.com] is a BB set of posts that is probably how most front page slashdotters would react to this topic, but it does have some insightful information, like this quote from halfway down the page

Let's see...whenever we've done tests with memory, the brain seems to be involved. The simplest example is that you can't remember anything if you've had your brain removed. More complex examples would be fMRI scans which show that different regions of the brain are active when you're doing different mental tasks, including the formation and recall of memories. You could say, "But that's just because the brain is interacting with the mystical unknown in ways which look like it's actually doing something!", but I'll Occam that argument: We have no evidence for non-physical things interacting with the physical realm, so when we see activity in the brain corresponding to activity in the "mind," we should assume that the brain is the location of the mind, not that the brain is some sort of mysterious conduit that we can't understand. If you've got some sort of experiment which would differentiate between these two views, I would be interested in hearing about it.

Also, your memory of the flavor of Pepsi is stored in the way that the neurons in your brain are connected to one another. I'll agree that we don't know exactly how memories work, but that doesn't mean that we know nothing of how memories work, and we should work with what knowledge we have rather than decide that understanding is an all-or-nothing process.

Which leads me to my belief that the organs DO almost all the work of memory, but it is the brain that stitches all that information back together, as well as some information storage of it's own. Does the fact that all information travel via the nerve clusters as electronic impulses that originate and return to the brain have anything to do with the electrical firing that MRI's and the like pick up? More and more I think this is really the case (If you are a medico student and want a thesis, use this, please, if you have seen papers published on this topic, please let me know!!!)

Re:Is there a name for what *I* have?

[Alioth]

I think that is entirely normal for a human, actually. The only people I know who remember names on 'first contact' are marketing/sales types (and I think their trick is to just use mnemonics or other memory jogging tricks).

Re:Experimental brain surgery

[JabberWokky]

I don't think they should have gone to jail. The vast majority were using the latest knowledge in an honest effort to help people. The alternatives, neglecting or abandoning the ill, are far more sick. Considering that's what preceded your "sick and sad time", I'd say that we're progressing... and that in 50 years, our current treatments will look terrible.

--
Evan

Re:When my mother had a stroke...

[shotgunefx]

While I'll give you credit for making a science joke, and a decent one, it's still kind of dickish don't you think?