The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2011 by Mary Roach Page B

1955, the night train from Montreal to Hartford. Brenda Milner, a young Cambridge-educated neuroscientist from McGill University, tries to sleep in the hurtling darkness. She's on her way to investigate a curious case of amnesia. Over the last year or so, she's begun to explore the mystery of how memory works. She knows that the scientific consensus is that memory is a diffuse phenomenon, one that can't be tracked to any particular part of the brain, but she's noticed that people with damage to their hippocampus sometimes have a particularly hard time remembering things. She has a hunch that the hippocampus plays some role in memory formation, and the patient she's going to see now will allow her to explore this hunch as never before: his hippocampus isn'tjust damaged, it's gone. From what she's been told, a surgeon, in a novel procedure, essentially removed it.
    The next morning, in my grandfather's office, Milner meets Henry for the first time. He's a good-looking kid with hazel eyes, cordial, polite, quick with a joke, easygoing. They chat for a little while, and it strikes her that you might never know, after just a short conversation, that there was anything wrong with him. And then Milner steps out of the office for a cup of coffee, comes back a few minutes later, and meets Henry for the first time all over again.
    Later my grandfather explains to Milner about the thirty or so other patients who've received variations of the operation he performed on Henry. These "severely deteriorated cases" were mostly schizophrenics and are scattered at various asylums around the state. He hasn't done much follow-up work on them and isn't sure if they've suffered the same sorts of memory deficits as Henry. He arranges a car and driver for Milner, so she can visit some of them. For the next few days, she descends into the back wards of one state institution after another. She has never been to an asylum before. She takes careful notes.
    Patient A. Z.: "35-year-old woman, a paranoid schizophrenic ... tense, assaultative, and sexually preoccupied..."
    Patient I. S.: "54-year-old woman ... auditory hallucinations and marked emotional lability..."
    Patient A. L.: "31-year-old schizophrenic man ... auditory and visual hallucinations..."
    Patient M. B.: "55-year-old manic depressive woman ... anxious, irritable, argumentative, and restless..."
    And on and on, quick sketches of profound damage. Many of these cases interest Milner—particularly Patient D. C., a brilliant and psychotic medical doctor who attempted to kill his wife—but she returns from her asylum odyssey convinced of Henry's singular importance. Though some of the asylum patients clearly suffer from a similar amnesia to Henry's, Henry uniquely combines a near-complete resection of both hemispheres of the hippocampus with a mind not otherwise muddied by mental illness. The only other patient who received an operation identical to Henry's—a "radical bilateral medial temporal lobe excision (with the posterior limit of removal 8 cm from the temporal tips)"—is so deeply disturbed that nobody even noticed her inability to create new memories until nearly a year after her surgery.
    Henry is the one.
    The testing begins.
    Â 
    In 1848 an explosion drives a steel tamping bar through the skull of a twenty-five-year-old railroad foreman named Phineas Gage, obliterating a portion of his frontal lobes. He recovers and seems to possess all his earlier faculties, with one exception: the formerly mild-mannered Gage is now something of a hellion, an impulsive shit-starter. Ipso facto, the frontal lobes must play some function in regulating and restraining our more animalistic instincts.
    In 1861 a French neurosurgeon named Pierre-Paul Broca announces that he has found the root of speech articulation in the brain. He bases his discovery on a patient of his, a man with damage to the left hemisphere of his inferior frontal lobe. The man comes to be known as Monsieur Tan,