What happens when you remove the hippocampus? - Sam Kean
View full lesson: http://ed.ted.com/lessons/what-happens-when-you-remove-the-hippocampus-sam-kean When Henry Molaison (now widely known as H.M.) cracked his skull in an accident, he began...
========== On September 1st, 1953, William Scoville used a hand crank
and a cheap drill saw to bore into a young man's skull,
cutting away vital pieces of his brain and sucking them out through a metal tube. But this wasn't a scene from a horror film
or a gruesome police report. Dr. Scoville was one of the most
renowned neurosurgeons of his time, and the young man was Henry Molaison,
the famous patient known as "H.M.", whose case provided amazing insights
into how our brains work. As a boy, Henry had cracked
his skull in an accident and soon began having seizures, blacking out
and losing control of bodily functions. After enduring years of frequent episodes,
and even dropping out of high school, the desperate young man
had turned to Dr. Scoville, ...