You are currently browsing the tag archive for the ‘H.M.’ tag.
For those of you somehow associated with neuroscience, you probably have run into those two letters sometime during the course of your studies. Oddly enough, I didn’t know what H.M.’s name really was, until the day he died. H.M. didn’t know much beyond his own name and a few memories up until 1953. It was then that he underwent an operation to remove part of his brain that was deemed responsible for his seizures. As a result, he lost the ability to create new memories.
Every person he met from then on was new, every place he visited was unfamiliar, no matter how many times he came into contact with them. I can’t imagine living a life like that, but his life allowed us to understand more about how our minds worked.
Thank you H.M. Maybe you will finally find some familiarity in the hereafter. Rest in peace.
