15 Facts About Henry Molaison

Henry Molaison resided in a care institute in Windsor Locks, Connecticut, where he was the subject of ongoing investigation.

Henry Molaison's case played an important role in the development of theories that explain the link between brain function and memory, and in the development of cognitive neuropsychology, a branch of psychology that aims to understand how the structure and function of the brain relates to specific psychological processes.

Henry Molaison was born on February 26,1926, in Manchester, Connecticut, and experienced intractable epilepsy that has sometimes been attributed to a bicycle accident at the age of seven.

Henry Molaison had minor or partial seizures for many years, and then major or tonic-clonic seizures following his 16th birthday.

Henry Molaison worked for a time on an assembly line but, by the age of 27, he had become so incapacitated by his seizures, despite high doses of anticonvulsant medication, that he could not work nor lead a normal life.

In 1953, Henry Molaison was referred to William Beecher Scoville, a neurosurgeon at Hartford Hospital.

Henry Molaison had moderate retrograde amnesia, and could not remember most events in the one- to two-year period before surgery, nor some events up to 11 years before, meaning that his amnesia was temporally graded.

Henry Molaison was able to fill in answers to clues that referred to pre-1953 knowledge.

The study of Henry Molaison revolutionized the understanding of the organization of human memory.

Henry Molaison's brain was the subject of an anatomical study funded by the Dana Foundation and the National Science Foundation.

Since Henry Molaison did not show any memory impairment before the surgery, the removal of the medial temporal lobes can be held responsible for his memory disorder.

However, for sentence-level language comprehension and production, Henry Molaison exhibited the same deficits and sparing as in memory.

Henry Molaison was able to remember information over short intervals of time.

Henry Molaison displayed a temporally graded retrograde amnesia in the way that he "could still recall childhood memories, but he had difficulty remembering events that happened during the years immediately preceding the surgery".

The article suggested that Corkin had destroyed research documents and data, and failed to obtain consent from Henry Molaison's closest living kin.