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Authors: Wendy Suzuki
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the surrounding cortical areas. This scan validated all the work that I had done for my dissertation, for which I earned my PhD and was awarded the prestigious Lindsley Prize, given by the Society for Neuroscience to the best doctoral dissertation in the field of behavioral neuroscience.
While I never met patient H.M., I thought so much about his brain and about what he could and could not remember that I felt like I knew him. I’ll never forget the morning of December 4, 2008, when I opened up the New York Times to see his obituary on the front page. My first shock was to learn his full name for the first time in the twenty years I had been studying him. Henry Molaison. This was very likely the best-kept secret in all of neuroscience, revealed only at the time of his death. It was like learning something precious and very personal about a friend the day that he died. I happened to be teaching a big lecture course that day on the topic of memory. I shared the news with the class and even got a little emotional as I told them. They must have all thought I was a bit strange, but I couldn’t help it. Henry Molaison, patient H.M., had given up so much in his life for our understanding of memory. Since the day of his surgery, he could never remember another Christmas or birthday celebration or vacation—he couldn’t have a deep relationship with another person or make any plans for his future. He lost something precious the day of his surgery, but his misfortune enriched our knowledge of the brain and memory in a profound way. I will always honor his sacrifice.
MRI
MRI stands for “magnetic resonance imaging,” and it is a powerful and common imaging tool that uses strong magnetic fields and radio waves to form images of the body, including the brain. This general imaging approach, also called structural imaging, is widely used to see the gross structure of the brain and the boundary between the so-called gray matter (cell bodies) and white matter (axonal pathways) of the brain.
MOVING ON: STUDYING MEMORY AT NIH AND STARTING MY OWN LAB
I had spent six years at U.C. San Diego mastering neuroanatomy and behavioral approaches to examine the connections of key brain areas in the medial temporal lobe as well as the effects of damage to those areas. While these are important areas of study, they still don’t let you look firsthand at what’s happening in the brain during the formation of new memories. That’s what I wanted to do next. I wanted to learn new approaches by which I could examine the patterns of electrical activity in brain cells as animals performed different memory tasks. I wanted to look directly at the cells and the activity in the hippocampus that was occurring as animals learned something new. I secured a position as a postdoctoral fellow in the lab of Robert Desimone at the National Institutes of Health to do just that.
Desimone’s lab was in the larger laboratory of neuropsychology run by Mort Mishkin, the same neuroscientist who had published key findings on the effects of hippocampus and amygdala lesions in animals and whom I had first heard about while in France. I spent the next four and a half years at NIH learning how to record the activity of individual and small groups of living brain cells as animals performed various memory tasks. This general approach is called behavioral neurophysiology, and it’s powerful because we can examine how patterns of electrical activity in the brain relate to actual behavior. It is also powerful because it gives us a direct window on understanding exactly how particular brain cells respond to a given behavioral task. This contrasts with the studies of what happens with brain damage, like in the case of H.M. While transformative for our understanding of memory, lesion studies are, by their nature, indirect. We are studying the lack of function that used to be there before the damage. By contrast with behavioral neurophysiology, we can start to understand how
While I never met patient H.M., I thought so much about his brain and about what he could and could not remember that I felt like I knew him. I’ll never forget the morning of December 4, 2008, when I opened up the New York Times to see his obituary on the front page. My first shock was to learn his full name for the first time in the twenty years I had been studying him. Henry Molaison. This was very likely the best-kept secret in all of neuroscience, revealed only at the time of his death. It was like learning something precious and very personal about a friend the day that he died. I happened to be teaching a big lecture course that day on the topic of memory. I shared the news with the class and even got a little emotional as I told them. They must have all thought I was a bit strange, but I couldn’t help it. Henry Molaison, patient H.M., had given up so much in his life for our understanding of memory. Since the day of his surgery, he could never remember another Christmas or birthday celebration or vacation—he couldn’t have a deep relationship with another person or make any plans for his future. He lost something precious the day of his surgery, but his misfortune enriched our knowledge of the brain and memory in a profound way. I will always honor his sacrifice.
MRI
MRI stands for “magnetic resonance imaging,” and it is a powerful and common imaging tool that uses strong magnetic fields and radio waves to form images of the body, including the brain. This general imaging approach, also called structural imaging, is widely used to see the gross structure of the brain and the boundary between the so-called gray matter (cell bodies) and white matter (axonal pathways) of the brain.
MOVING ON: STUDYING MEMORY AT NIH AND STARTING MY OWN LAB
I had spent six years at U.C. San Diego mastering neuroanatomy and behavioral approaches to examine the connections of key brain areas in the medial temporal lobe as well as the effects of damage to those areas. While these are important areas of study, they still don’t let you look firsthand at what’s happening in the brain during the formation of new memories. That’s what I wanted to do next. I wanted to learn new approaches by which I could examine the patterns of electrical activity in brain cells as animals performed different memory tasks. I wanted to look directly at the cells and the activity in the hippocampus that was occurring as animals learned something new. I secured a position as a postdoctoral fellow in the lab of Robert Desimone at the National Institutes of Health to do just that.
Desimone’s lab was in the larger laboratory of neuropsychology run by Mort Mishkin, the same neuroscientist who had published key findings on the effects of hippocampus and amygdala lesions in animals and whom I had first heard about while in France. I spent the next four and a half years at NIH learning how to record the activity of individual and small groups of living brain cells as animals performed various memory tasks. This general approach is called behavioral neurophysiology, and it’s powerful because we can examine how patterns of electrical activity in the brain relate to actual behavior. It is also powerful because it gives us a direct window on understanding exactly how particular brain cells respond to a given behavioral task. This contrasts with the studies of what happens with brain damage, like in the case of H.M. While transformative for our understanding of memory, lesion studies are, by their nature, indirect. We are studying the lack of function that used to be there before the damage. By contrast with behavioral neurophysiology, we can start to understand how
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