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When Henry Molaison woke up the morning this picture was taken, he looked in the mirror and had no idea why he was not 27 years old

Circa 1948 Wilder Penfield suggested that certain aspects of human memory can be stored in descrete brain regions. Penfield, a neurosurgeon specializing in focal epilepsy treatment, developed a technique for removing epileptic tissue while avoiding/minimizing damage to areas involved in patients mental processing. Applying local anasthetic to various brain regions of conscious patients, he determined that areas of the medial temporal lobes seemed to be important for memory. Although this idea was met with controversy, a number of neurosurgeons were inspired by Penfield’s work, among them were William Scoville and Brenda Milner. The duo of Scoville an Milner report the extraordanary story of the patient H.M. (His name is Henry Molaison. Only in death will we have our own names since only in death are we no longer part of the effort. In death we become heroes).

If HM ever played guitar, he would have been the only living member of the Forever-27 Club. His tragic accident that lead to the bilateral removal of his medial temporal lobes at the age of 27 would inform the field of neuroscience at a level deserving of a Nobel Prize. First HM showed us that the medial temporal lobe was important for converting short term memories into long term memories. He then showed us that there was various other types of learning and memory that did not include the hippocampus. At 1:00 pm tomorrow (Wednesday, 11.17.2010), Suzanne Corkin, Ph.D. is presenting a special lecture on how HM shaped the science of memory. Do not miss out!

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OneSci is pleased to announce that we have begun to publish our own open source empirical research findings which include open user comments and commentary.

Local increase in cortical ACh signaling during performance of a motor skill learning task.
Biane, J. (2010). The OneSci Journal 1(A), e1-e4.

We have new conference posters up!

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