The year is 1953.
A man is lying on an operating table.
He’s awake but drowsy from the pain killers he’s been administered.
The sound of a drill fills the air as everyone in the room anxiously holds their breath.
Nothing like this has ever been done before.
Above the man’s eyes, two holes are drilled, and the surgeon, his hands slightly shaking,
uses a straw to carefully suck out parts of the man’s brain.
This piece of historical surgery is going to have a devastating outcome, but the man
on the table, a martyr of sorts, will never be forgotten.
It’s just a pity that he will forget quite a lot.
This is the strange tale of Henry Gustav Molaison.
What happened to him is unnerving.
It’s sad, but it’s also fascinating given that Henry ended up living a similar kind
of life to the protagonist in a movie you all know: Memento.
But let’s go back to the start.
How did Henry Molaison end up on that operating table in the first place?
He was born on February 26, 1926, in Manchester, Connecticut.
For the first few years of his life, he was just an ordinary kid doing ordinary things,
but then when he was seven, he had quite a bad accident while he was out playing on his
bicycle.
It took a few years to realize just how bad his head injury was.
When he was 10, he started having minor seizures, but by the time he was 16, he started having
quite regular major seizures.
Head trauma can do that to a person.
Such an injury can cause the electrical signals in the brain to misfire, so when people have
seizures, you could say it is almost like the brain short-circuiting.
Year by year, his seizures grew in regularity and intensity.
The family doctor gave him numerous medications.
He managed to graduate from high school, but as those years ticked over, the seizures became
more and more worrying.
One minute, he’d be out shooting guns with his father; the next, he’d be foaming at
the mouth.
He still managed to hold down various jobs, but around the time he was in his early 20s
and working on an assembly line in a motor factory, the seizures started getting even
worse.
It became almost impossible to work, not to mention dangerous.
He knew that he couldn’t go on living like this.
He was willing to do anything to get the seizures to stop.
Neuroscience was about to be revolutionized, with Henry as the Guinea pig.
His parents were told by their doctor that there was a famous neurosurgeon who might
be able to help.
His name was William Scoville.
At the time, Scoville had committed himself to some rather precarious procedures, mainly
working with patients who were suffering severe forms of mental illnesses such as psychosis.
In Scoville’s mind, such an illness could be cured or at least attenuated by removing
a part or parts of the brain.
No doubt you’ve heard of a medical procedure called a lobotomy.
For a long time, the brain had been a bit of a mystery to scientists.
Even now, they have a lot to learn about this hyper-complex organ.
In the 1950s, they knew much less.
Still, some so-called brain experts didn’t mind trying this fairly new procedure.
The incredibly risky process of removing bits of the brain.
You need to know how neurosurgeons got to this point, and why Scoville thought it was
ok to hack off and remove parts of Henry’s head.
So now we’ll introduce a man named Phineas Gage.
On September 13, 1848, Gage was working on the railroad in Vermont.
He was packing some dynamite into a hole when an explosion sent a bar, called a tamping
iron, right through his open mouth.
The bar went through his head and landed about 80 feet (25 meters) away.
He was sitting in a hotel when a doctor arrived, and he said the famous words, “Doctor, here
is business enough for you.”
He seemed ok for such a big accident, but when he vomited, a fair bit of brain matter
exited the top of his skull.
Not cool, by any standards.
It was a miracle he survived, but what’s important here is that medical science realized
you could function with good chunks of your brain missing.
Scientists also learned that parts of the brain must have different functions.
That’s because Mr. Gage changed after his accident.
Not only did he start having seizures, but his personality completely transformed.
For some, this once nice man became intolerable.
He was described as being, “gross, profane, coarse, and vulgar.”
People said he was the same man on the outside but not the same man on the inside.
This was of great help to people who studied the brain, and it wasn’t long until the
word “psychosurgery” was mentioned in medical papers.
Psychosurgery is surgery on the brain undertaken to try and lessen the effects of a certain
condition, such as psychosis.
The WHO describes it as, “The selective surgical removal or destruction of nerve pathways
to influence behavior.”
Fast-forward to more modern times, and people began doing a bit too much psychosurgery.
And when it comes to lobotomies, the name you need to know is Walter Freeman.
From the 1930s to the 1960s, Freeman performed thousands of lobotomies.
He traveled around the US, telling everyone who would listen that he could cure their
illness, whether it was depression, psychosis, mania, or even an unruly kid who occasionally,
triumphantly, smashes his toys.
In those days, there were no ADHD drugs or antipsychotic drugs.
Freeman had a fairly new technique, too, that he’d learned from a doctor in Europe.
With this technique, he no longer needed to drill into the skull to cure his patients.
So now he could travel around the US in a van, set up a clinic for a few days, and perform
lobotomies on anyone who turned up.
His new method was simple.
He put an icepick through the eye and bashed it into the brain with a mallet.
Surprisingly, this wasn’t very painful.
The brain doesn’t have pain receptors, but we imagine the 10-minute procedure could still
have been quite uncomfortable, especially when the doctor wiggled the icepick around
inside the patient’s soft brain matter.
Freeman reported that he was curing Americans of their various mental illnesses, but the
truth is, he did much more damage than good.
For example, President John F. Kennedy's sister Rosemary Kennedy visited him, and the operation
left her with serious mental and physical disabilities.
He traveled around 23 states and performed at least 2,500 icepick lobotomies, sometimes
at the cost of just $25.
Around 100 of his patients died, and many more were left in a vegetative state.
19 victims were children, with the youngest patient being only 4.
Parents sometimes sent their kids for a lobotomy when they started to become unruly and rebelled
against them.
Can you imagine your parents doing that to you?
“Have you done your homework?...No…Ok, lobotomy it is for you dear offspring.”
In 1960, a man named Howard Dully was sent to see Freeman when he was just 11.
Like many kids, he loved riding his bicycle and playing chess, but he didn’t always
follow his parents’ rules, and he had a propensity for stealing candy bars.
His mother also didn’t like the fact he was prone to bouts of daydreaming.
When he met with Freeman, and the two had a quiet chat, Freeman wrote in his notes,
“If it's a banana, he throws the peel at the window; if it's a candy bar, he leaves
the wrapper around someplace.
He does a good deal of daydreaming, and when asked about it, he says, ‘I don’t know’.”
Freeman told the parents that their child suffered from childhood schizophrenia, although
no other doctor had ever said anything of the sort.
The next thing Dully knew, he was lying in a bed with two swollen eyes.
Little did he know that he’d just undergone one of the most brutal operations in history,
and his parents, the state, and much of the medical community thought it was just fine.
Freeman was showered in praise as if he was some kind of traveling showman.
The public couldn’t wait until he came to town and cured all their mental patients,
when Freeman was in reality not far from being a shady salesman turning up in their town
with miracle-inducing snake oil.
As for Dully, he spent much of his adult life addicted to drugs and alcohol, as well as
spending a fair bit of time in various prisons and mental institutions.
He was one of the lucky ones.
Freeman maimed many people, but left others unable to form an intelligent thought ever
again.
He was banned from performing his lobotomies when one too many people had died, but by
then, it was too late.
The damage had been done.
And this ban happened way after Henry Molaison showed up at Dr. Scovill’e office asking
to be cured of his seizures.
These days you won’t find surgeons haphazardly rummaging around in people’s heads.
It’s just too dangerous.
Right now, groundbreaking work is being done in a field of neuroscience called optogenetics.
In short, scientists can use lasers to hit various brain cells, which act as a chemical
input.
Such a command can make lazy mice start working like crazy.
Another command in another part of the brain can make a peaceful mouse attack the nearest
mouse and try and tear it to shreds with its teeth.
But back in 1953, the cutting-edge thing was psychosurgery.
As you know, a man who bashed an icepick into children’s brains was seen by some as a
medical messiah, so when Henry, then aged 27, went to see Dr, Scoville, he was informed
that new experiments were taking place and there was a possibility that he could be cured
of his seizures if he gave up a part of his brain.
Scoville told him that the epilepsy was being caused by problems in his brain’s left and
right medial temporal lobes.
He suggested that Henry undergo something called a surgical resection.
That basically meant having the problematic parts of his brain removed.
Scoville explained that it was next-level in terms of medical science, but he couldn’t
guarantee that Henry wouldn’t experience any side effects.
The man who goes into that surgery might not be the same man who comes out, said Scoville,
but he also said when he’d removed bits of brain from his psychotic patients, he discovered
that some of them stopped having seizures.
There was a risk, he said, but there was also a good chance Henry could be cured.
Fast-forward to 1986.
Henry, now 60 years old, is sitting in a chair opposite a researcher.
He’s not quite the same man who went through that operation.
Things didn’t go too well.
Scoville removed more brain than he should have, and poor Henry lost his hippocampus,
his amygdala, and his entorhinal cortex, as well as some other regions of his brain.
That was a lot of brain!
It was unheard of.
In fact, it was a tragedy.
The hippocampus we usually associate with learning and memories.
You can’t just give that thing up.
The amygdala we associate with fear processing.
The entorhinal cortex deals with memories, but also navigation, and our perception of
time.
The good news was that Henry’s epilepsy wasn’t as bad after that, but the bad news
was Henry wasn’t really Henry anymore.
Scoville wrote in his notes that Henry now could not “find his way to the bathroom,
and he seemed to recall nothing of the day-to-day events of his hospital life.”
When Scoville later talked about why he went ahead and took out significant parts of the
brain, he replied, “I prefer action to thought, which is why I am a surgeon.
I like to see results.”
He’d been reckless, is what he should have said.
He sent Henry home, and the damage was immediately noticeable.
His parents said he could do stuff like mow the lawn, but then he’d soon forget where
he’d put the lawnmower and that he’d done the mowing.
They said he read the same magazine over and over as if it was always new to him.
Henry was suffering from something called anterograde amnesia.
That basically means you can’t form new memories.
This is why Scoville eventually admitted his surgery had been “a tragic mistake” and
that no other neurosurgeon should ever repeat it.
Sitting in that room in 1986, the researcher asked Henry who the US President was.
The answer, of course, was Ronald Regan, but Henry said with confidence that it was Dwight
D. Eisenhower.
That’s because Eisenhower was the President in 1953 when Henry had his operation.
Unable to create new memories, Henry lived the rest of his life in the same moment.
After 30 seconds to one minute, things started again.
Imagine trying to get through a day like that!
After he replied to that question, he asked the doctor where he was.
He was at MIT, and he’d been told that numerous times.
He then looked down and asked why he was in a wheelchair.
He’d broken his ankle a while back but kept forgetting that.
His life was one big perpetual loop of coming into being and passing away.
Still, when he was quizzed about geography, he showed that he knew lots of stuff about
the natural environment.
He was pretty good at general knowledge.
His IQ hadn’t been changed at all, or might have even improved.
His motor skills were not affected, and neither were his language skills.
But when the doctor asked where he lived, he said at home with his mother.
He was asked about his father, to which he said he wasn’t sure if his father was alive.
The truth was that Henry lived in a nursing home.
He remembered people that he’d loved and then had to constantly grieve their loss when
he was told the truth about them.
His father died many times every single day.
The New York Times wrote, “This cycle of death and resurrection may have been painful.
For a while, Henry made a habit of carrying around a little scrap of paper reminding him
that his father was dead.”
Even though this sounds like a nightmare, Henry often looked as though he was very happy.
Researchers said every minute of the day for him was like an adventure.
He was lost in a world that was inventing itself in front of him every 30 or so seconds,
and sometimes that might have felt like fun.
What happened to Henry moved brain science forward a few notches.
Up until his operation, scientists had thought that memories were stored all over the brain,
including the parts of the brain we associate with intellect.
Now they knew much more about how new memories were made in the hippocampus.
Even though he’d had his amygdala removed, he still feared things.
This was certainly not the case with a US patient we only know as patient SM-046.
In the 1990s, she had a disease that destroyed her amygdala.
After that, she became fearless.
Scientists even let her play with snakes and spiders, something that she would have never
been able to do before.
Reports say she was positive on the whole but useless at recognizing danger and negative
emotions in other people.
Such a thing didn’t bode well for her when she went out into the sometimes-dangerous
streets of America.
She got into all kinds of easily-avoidable dangerous situations, including being held
at gunpoint and almost killed when she was attacked.
While you might think it would be cool not to fear anything, it’s fear that often saves
us from harming ourselves.
Henry may have still had a capacity to fear things, and he was generally in a positive
mood, but life was tough.
He didn’t seem to know that he had to eat, not even when his stomach rumbled.
When eating a meal, often the French toast he loved, he’d forget he was eating it halfway
through.
But at least when he looked back to his plate, he knew to go back to it.
Since he could pick up on things like that, he could also finish crossword puzzles and
read through an entire newspaper.
In one test, doctors asked him to trace a star shape while looking at the piece of paper
in a mirror.
He did this lots and lots of times, but each time he thought he was doing it for the first
time.
He’d still get better at it with more practice, even though he didn’t know he’d practiced.
He once told the doctor, “Well, this is strange.
I thought that that would be difficult.
But it seems as though I’ve done it quite well.”
Of course, he had; he was an expert at it by then.
It seems he wasn’t attracted to women, or at least he was unable to understand any natural
bodily attraction he might have had.
Still, once he was asked what a male erection was, and he seemed to understand, saying,
“A man gets it, below the belt.”
Henry was called the most famous brain in the world and the “the brain that changed
everything.”
He was special, although he had no idea he was.
He didn’t really even understand that he was getting older since every day he was back
in 1953.
When he was already in his Autumn years, a nurse caught him looking in the mirror.
She asked him what he saw, to which he replied, “I’m not a boy.”
He knew something had changed, but he still couldn’t understand what was happening to
his body.
This is how things went on for years.
Henry actually served as the inspiration for the movie, Memento, because he used post-it
notes and polaroid photographs to help him navigate an existence that constantly kept
renewing itself.
As he became an old man he developed dementia, and then in 2008, aged 82, his light finally
went out.
His brain, though, that’s still famous today.
It was cut into 2,401,70 micro slices and became a kind of brain map, what some people
have called a Google Earth of the brain.
Now you need to watch “Weirdest Brain Disorders.”
Or, have a look at “What Happens to Your Brain When You're High?”