Henry Molaison, also known as Patient H. M., underwent brain surgery, removing portions of the hippocampus on both sides of his brain, to stop severe epileptic seizures. What happened to his memory as a result of the surgery?

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BlackTom AI · Accepted Answer

Question restatement: Henry Molaison (H. M.) underwent bilateral hippocampal removal to treat epilepsy, and the prompt asks what happened to his memory as a result.
Option 1: 'H. M. forgot the names of common objects, like "door" and "chair."' This description would imply a broad semantic memory deficit or specific object-name forgetting. In HM’s case, the major documented deficit was in forming new memories (anterograde amnesia), not a selective loss of common object names across the board. He could recognize familiar items and learned associations but struggled to form new explicit memories mapping objects to new experiences.
Option 2: 'H. M. forgot everything that happened to him before the surgery.' This would indicate a complete retrograde amnesia extending to all prior experiences. In reality, HM retained many memories from before surgery, especially memories older than his onset of amnesia and most of his non-declarative memory. Retrograde amnesia, when present, tended to be limited and not total for all pre-surgery experiences.
Option 3: 'H. M. developed problems remembering faces and names.' This would reflect prosopagnosia or a general associative memory impairment for faces and names. While memory impairments can be broad, the defining and most consistent effect in HM is the inability to form new memories after the surgery, rather than a specific or predominant deficit in face/name recognition.
Option 4: 'H. M. lost the ability to form new memories.' This aligns with the classic and well-established outcome of hippocampal damage: anterograde amnesia, meaning HM could not encode new explicit memories after the surgery, though his existing memories prior to surgery were largely intact and some non-declarative/procedural learning could still occur without conscious recollection.
Overall, the core concept at play is the role of the hippocampus in forming new explicit (declarative) memories. The other options describe memory problems that either overstate the retrograde loss, misattribute specific deficits (like face-name memory as a primary issue), or imply semantic object-name loss that isn’t the hallmark outcome for HM.

Henry Molaison, also known as Patient H. M., underwent brain surgery, removing portions of the hippocampus on both sides of his brain, to stop severe epileptic seizures. What happened to his memory as a result of the surgery?

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