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Interesting how he was able to draw an accurate floor-plan of the house after his onset of amnesia. Shows the retention of certain abilities and memories even though he has anterograde amnesia. Suggests that brain region- memory links are complicated.

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H.M. might recognize himself in the mirror

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H.M. might recognize himself in the mirror

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H.M. retained sensory information and ability to develop new sensorimotor skills. He was got faster at maze drawing task (develop new sensorimotor skills) but made the same number of mistakes (anterograde amnesia extending to somatosensory system)

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Normal recognition of complex colour image after delay intervals -> some parts of short term memory?

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Slow development of motor skills compared to control but ability to attain new skills is retained

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Monkeys with MTL lesions able to do the concurrent discrimination task but humans with MTL lesions cannot

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He can still retain some sort of spatial memory and can still make judgements based on familiarity instead of memory

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strange that when prompted about pre-surgery  life events he tends to recall semantic information about his family rather than episodic memories

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H.M was able to develop new motor skills - as shown in the mirror drawing task

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H.M was able to develop new motor skills - as shown in the mirror drawing task

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I went through the articles and found that there were so many landmarks and discoveries that scientists did with H.M. I was amazed by his ability to draw a floor plan, no change in personality and intelligence and some of his intact motor skills. The most striking thing for me would be that, although he may not be aware of, he made a such big contribution to our understanding of memory by providing some real evidence. Just as the articles said, we are in his debt. Thanks him so much.

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Is is interesting that HM could create a cognitive map of the layout of his house, after his hippocampus was remove. This may suggest that this type of memory is not encoded in the same way as semantic or

episodic memories.

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Considering declarative memory was impaired and thus he should not have autobiographical recollections of being studied he nevertheless was aware of the fact that he was being studied but also could not remember anything. He was not able to form other long term memories and claimed his aged was 27 showing he was essentially stuck at one point in time.

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Evidence suggests that medial temporal lobe structures such as the hippocampus are essential for long-term retention of information and acquiring new semantic knowledge -> importance for future operations and considering the risks of having the hippocampus removed.

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Encoding episodic events as semantic memories?

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Encoding episodic events as semantic memories?

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The visuospatial nature of H.M's memory of the floor plan, combined with his inability to learn new words, may suggest that if episodic events were encoded in a visual and/or spatial manner (instead of in a visual, but static, or verbal manner as more episodic memories may be), they may have been encoded semantically. For example, a room could have been filled with a maze-like layout of images depicting events in his life since the operation – if he learned to navigate the room, he may have ‘learned’ the events, although possibly in a way disconnected from himself. However, it is also possible that he would merely learn the layout of the room while being unable to remember the specific details of the objects and images included. The extent of the details learned in this way may have also been limited.

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I find it fascinating that some of H.M's memories have been "semanticised" when asked of memories about his childhood. It made me think about the process by which and episodic memory becomes a semantic one and the fine line that divides these two types of declarative memories. I may be wrong but I feel this also links to the way in which H.M. had a preserved topographical representation of his old house. If this constant daily locomotion and rehearsal of his house is what lead him to recall it, does it mean that this memory of his house was also semanticised? Does that mean these memories from H.M.'s childhood were also constantly rehearsed in his mind when growing up and hence why these memories were semanticised or perhaps there is another process in which this process occurs.

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Really interesting how words that were not in his vocabulary before the lesion were not affected by priming in word-stem completion tasks. Seems like the words don't have consolidated pre-existing representations in the brain which doesn't allow priming to have an effect. However, it would be interesting to see if new words could be learnt by H.M. through daily repetition and compensation from cortical regions as suggested in Corkin (2002). Additionally, it would be interesting to see if these new words would be affected by priming

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It was most surprising to me that after the complete loss of long-term memory, he appeared happy, normal and without any significant detriment to the way his world fit together. The article describes his indifference to his failure to recollect his appearance, or episodic events normally integral to people's sense of self; some of this would due to the excised amygdala which would attenuate the experience of fear. However, it is hard to see how such a discontinuous experience wouldn't affect the  person at all-  I also found some case reports of people who had similar forms of anterograde amnesia without resection of the amygdala. It definitely suggests that the continuity of experience is not alone mediated by the sequence of events alone; the disturbance of sense of self in both frontal lobe damage and diseases involving pathology in the frontal lobe better locates it there. What makes it interesting is that it seems to show that the sense of who one is, existing in a narrative capacity, and what one really has been, are completely separable things, showing that the intuitive connection between both is not necessarily there.

just editing this after reading oliver sack's article about clive wearing; his refrain about 'no dreams day or night, it's like being dead' seems much more representative of what I might think a fragmentary life would feel like

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It was interesting to see that H.M. could recall memories of childhood experiences (pre-surgery) but that those memories held less personal and more factual. I had assumed that the H.M.'s surgery led to him not being able to form new episodic memories, and I hadn't thought that his pre-existing episodic memories could have been altered. Maybe this suggests that semantic memory and episodic memory is not as separate as thought?

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removing H.M's amygdala also removed his sense of fear and consequently leaves him unfazed by the fact that he is aging everyday- because his fusiform face area is intact, he is still able to recognise and be familiar with how his face looks- which could also aid his lack of concern with his appearance because he perceives his face as familiar - I find this very interesting and wonder if H.M.'s memory is still 'stuck' as his 16 or 27 year old self how he is still content with realising that his appearance is changing daily.. perhaps he realises in the moment when he looks in the mirror that he "is not a boy" but the link between his STM and LTM is missing and therefore these memories continue to be distinct and never elicit any fear of growing older

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I was fascinated that despite his severe amnesia, Patient H.M. was still very aware of what constituted socially acceptable behaviour, held himself to a high moral standard, and had a conscience. He was very socially capable, charming and had a sense of humour. It is very interesting to me that even though this knowledge was subconscious, it was still retained despite his amnesia.

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It is interesting that his semantic knowledge did include some information from the decades after his surgery and that he showed some recognition ability when given prompts such as phonemic cues.

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H.M. failed to perform on the Tower of Hanoi puzzle, which is not hard to understand why as he has impaired functioning on long-term memories. This inability may lead to the concern that patients like H.M who has hippocampal lesions are facing troubles with future planning or sub-goal settings.

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How HM was still able to recall the layout of a new home, even able to draw a map of it as well as the address, while being unable to recall word lists or what he did the day before; the concept of the localisation of such specific elements of memory in different areas is really interesting. i was also wondering if, due to the severity of his epileptic seizures before the surgery, how do we know that there was no other damage to his brain explaining some of the more atypical elements of his amnesia or lack of self-concept?

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I was surprised to find that HM could still improve in the mirror star drawing task even though he did not remember having taken part in the task before. This was evidence that there are different types of long-term memory and, personally seems like one of the most interesting findings.

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What I found very interesting was HM's contribution to the study of habit. Him, along with another severely amnesic patient, could not perform a concurrent discrimination task, unlike monkeys who could perform the task and had the same MTL lesions. Upon searching further explanations for this, I found that a possible explanation is that unlike monkeys, humans use explicit memory to solve concurrent discrimination tasks (Hood, Postle & Corkin, 1999).

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Click the plus button in the bottom right corner to add a comment about what you found interesting about H.M.'s contribution to our understanding of memory!

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I was surprised to read that HM had topographical memory of his new home after the removal of his hippocampus. This showed that a seemingly simple type of memory (e.g., spacial memory) is facilitated by many intricate regions of the brain working in collaboration. Even when one area of the brain related to a specific function is removed, the remaining related regions could make up for it (to a certain extent?).

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Beyond HM's responses and various studies, in the broader context these studies show that when one region or ability is impaired in the brain, there are always complementary parts. In the case of HM, I think it is unfair to say that he lost all of his memory, bearing the fact that he could still remember details of the past, some semantic knowledge etc.
In addition, in my opinion it was really interesting to see that his general intelligence did not change, which also suggests that intelligence is a factor that is not influenced by human experience in the first place.

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He still was able to have beliefs (crossword puzzle = fun) and values (moral and social, offered to hold professor's hand on the sidewalk). It was also surprising that a lot of the events mentioned H.M. having a sense of humor. Since he could not recall recent events, does this mean that the sense of self he was portraying was his carried on from before the surgery, and that there was no way a personality change could have occured?

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It really goes to show that our memory of skills is separate to our declarative memory that he was able to perform well in mirror-drawing tasks after a year of not practicing them. I wonder if he was ever confused as to where the skill came from?

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Floor-plan drawing: revealing the need for an "infinite" number of repetitions

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Floor-plan drawing: revealing the need for an "infinite" number of repetitions

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To expand on the post regarding this experiment, H.M's ability to draw the floor plan of the house he has moved in after the onset of his amnesia reveals a critical aspect of all spatial experiments he has done. As highlighted in the paper, H.M.'s ability to draw this floor-plan might be due to the fact that he has had an unquantifiable number of exposures to the disposition of the rooms. Reaching this many repetitions is impossible in laboratory settings. So perhaps H.M.'s inability to perform well on the spatial memory tasks is not inherently impossible, but it needs so many repetitions that it would be impossible to observe him succeed in a lab setting.