Brain Surgery Patient Trapped in a Mental Time Warp 338
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.""
A bit more about him (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:On the bright side... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:A bit more about him (Score:5, Interesting)
She even learned how to sneak out and buy beer, and did so repeatedly. We were all impressed by that one. Of course, she pled innocent, and as far as she knows she was.
Mirror, mirror (Score:5, Interesting)
I never considered surgery (Score:5, Interesting)
The brain has a fantastic ability to route around damage, but 53 years after this man's surgery, we still don't know enough about the way it works to reliably fix problems that the brain itself cannot handle.
(Then again, my seizure episodes aren't nearly as frequent as described in the article.)
Re:Mirror, mirror (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:I never considered surgery (Score:1, Interesting)
Experimental brain surgery (Score:5, Interesting)
Apparently what happened in practice is that doctors would use coat hangers or any other bits of wire they could find, and slash at the brain until the symptoms stopped.
Arguably, though, severe brain damage (through cutting chunks out or prodding them wildly with steel rods) was probably a better fate than those in Victorian asylums, which combined all the home comforts of a Soviet-era Siberian prison camp with the theraputic properties of a medieval torture chamber. At least the victims of the medical experiments were often incapable of suffering much. (Some, just not as much.)
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. That is many thousands of times better again than those who underwent the surgery.
With the newer discoveries being produced through fMRI and other next-generation scanning equiptment, I fully expect the next thirty to fourty years to produce as many radical changes to neurological treatments as the past thirty to fourty have. It'll be interesting to see how things change.
When my mother had a stroke... (Score:5, Interesting)
I rushed to the hospital, she seemed ok, but weak. We talked for hours, everything seemed fine. I still don't know what prompted me to ask the question as our converstation was pretty much normal. I asked her "Do you know you who I am?"
She said "No, should I?". Pretty much the worst moment of my life. As it turned out, she though it was 1968 and she was in there to give birth to what would be my brother Kevin.
Thankfully, over the next few weeks, most of it came back, but it all came back in chronological order.
She was back to the 1980's within a few hours, but the next 12 years came back much slower. She thought I was still with my first girlfriend circa 1990, that we had our old pets. The last few years were the only thing that remained somewhat little fuzzy.
I always thought that was very telling about the mind. Not sure exactly what it says, but it definitely says something. Maybe memory is stored tree-like. The other thing that was odd, was the closer to the present it got, the slower it came back.
Re:Experimental brain surgery (Score:4, Interesting)
Around that time, theory was a lot more advanced than practice.
Boy is that an understatement. There was also little in the area of medical ethics. A lot of those doctors should have gone to jail for what they did. This is the same era where insulin shock and electro-shock were standard practices for several mental illnesses. What a sick and sad time.
Is there a name for what *I* have? (Score:5, Interesting)
I've have one that's very specific, but only been a minor nuisance. I blow people's names. Especially in a work environment, where I'm constantly meeting new people. A new person will have to remind me of their name anywhere from six to twelve times before it sinks in. Some people I know for awhile, then start calling them by the wrong name for a while. Then I stop that and get back to calling them by their right name again. Most people are understanding (I have to explain myself), but some get quite offended.
Mind you, it's the only memory defect I have. I can remember a face after meeting a person once and not seeing them for years. In conversation with a co-worker on a day-to-day basis, I can tell them what we talked about yesterday, what they were wearing last week, everything they've told me about themselves down to the most minute detail. Just not their name! But in most cases, I finally get them straight after a few months.
I was just wondering, with all the psych buffs in here...(PS it works this way online, too. I'm more likely to remember posters by their sig, or even just by their writing style, or on other forums by their icons...I'll even place people by their ID-number before their names!)
Re:When my mother had a stroke... (Score:3, Interesting)
Something along those lines, at any rate.
--Ryvar
More importantly (Score:3, Interesting)
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Re:Is there a name for what *I* have? (Score:2, Interesting)
No psych buff here but I remember reading that the association for names is stored in a different place, a more recent area that lives outside the hippocampus (primitive or early brain), probably because language skills came later on the evolution cycle. You can remember the aftershave/perfume they wear, mental image of their features and the way they walk, habits etc. because they are more closely linked to the hippocampus. Think early man and what he needed to know to survive, that's at the core and readily accessed, everything else was shuffled to the back.
So, I don't know if there is a name for it but I think it's just normal, everyone has it to a certain degree.Re:More importantly (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:A bit more about him (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm really sorry to break this to you, but the last few years of your life are likely to be miserable and painful anyway.
I know it is very comforting to believe that you can avoid this by living healthily, but you are still going to degenerate and die. And that process is not necessarily going to be more comfortable just because you ate tofu all the time and never passed up an opportunity to whine about someone smoking a cigarette 50 feet away from you.
If there is a God, I strongly suspect that He has a very dark sense of humour. Leading an excessively healthy life probably counts as provocation.
A bit about my boyfriend (Score:5, Interesting)
In the weeks afterward, Andy had some fairly classic stroke symptoms, including paralysis on his right side. He couldn't talk, even to say his own name. But he could sing songs with people, because that skill is located on the right side of the brain, rather than on the left side with our language centers. And when his nasogastric feeding tube was pulled out, he spat out a very intelligible "fuck". Evidently swearing becomes a reflex.
While he was still recovering the ability to stand and to walk, he had to be watched all the time, because he'd keep trying to get up out of his wheelchair... unsuccessfully. But the fact that he kept trying to use his right arm and leg - not remembering that they didn't work - probably helped their recovery.
Every time I talked to Andy, I'd tell him about my new apartment; he'd usually - but not always - react with surprise. During one phone conversation (which wasn't going very well because he was distracted by the TV in front of him), I asked if I could talk to his father (with whom he was staying). Andy put down the cordless phone, saw that Dad was busy, looked up at the TV... and forgot I was there. I had to yell from the sofa cushion to get his attention, so he'd pick up the phone again. Conversations were always difficult because "what did you do today?" would elicit either shrugs or he'd just make something up, his mind grasping at any random memory that might serve as an answer. I frequently fell back on retelling him the same stories about my life lately, just to fill time and stay connected to him, and hoping that maybe they'd sink in.
He did gradually form some new memories. His therapists accomplished some of this by chronic repetition. Living in an environment with lots of calendars and repeated quizzes about the month and year, he got fairly good at remembering that. By asking him over and over during our drive home from a restaurant what the name of it was (no, he didn't find it annoying; each time I asked he barely remembered that previous time), he was able to remember it an hour later. Once, in response to me commenting about my shitty finances, he commented about "the new apartment". After several months of telling him about the fact that I'd gone back to college for another degree, he seemed surprised when I mentioned it again, but on a hunch I asked him what the name of it was, and he remembered. But for the most part, he learned to compensate for short-term memory with habits and with a lot of clever guessing.
I wish I could tell you about Andy's condition in the long-term, but his family won't let me see or talk to him anymore. (They say he'd get overstimulated and unmanageable after I visited or called on the phone... and I never got along that well with them to begin with.) I fought this at first, but since they're better able to care for him (they have money and a support network; I'm just me and underemployed), and since he's painlessly unaware that I'm not in his life anymore (for all he knows, he might have just seen me yesterday), I finally had to let go. More of the personal sob-story details can be found here [toddverbeek.com].
Re:The Missing Marine (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:A bit more about him (Score:3, Interesting)
One would wonder then, if someone who was deaf had the same thing happen, how their memory would be affected? Because teaching them facts would involve using ASL, which you think would be equated with the motor memory.
Re:Is there a name for what *I* have? (Score:3, Interesting)
Is "holding pictures" meant to be metaphorical in any way? Until recently I thought "I can see it in my mind" was just a flowery way of saying "I am familiar with it". I'm quite blind inside in most mundane states of consciousness - couldn't even visualize a circle, much less whatever happy places people purport to see in meditations. Yet I could probably describe or draw familiar faces or objects as well as or better than the average non-artist.
This is frustrating - it's like I'm imagination-impaired. Daydreaming means thoughts, feelings, concepts, dialogue - words, above all... not that there's anything wrong with it, but something more sensual would be nice every now and then. Same with books (or text adventures)... it's work to get anything other than "noise" out of the descriptions. And I rarely understand where the characters are.
Visual memory's similarly bad. Never ask me for directions; geography's just a jumbled mess of very faint impressions to me with precious few links between them. And reading "fixed" maps - forget about it. They never point in the right direction.
On the other hand, spelling's never been a serious problem for me.
So. Do you people actually see things in your heads? Can you picture a face/scene/object/symbol - and really look at it?
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