Short Term Memory

As a gift for graduating the 8th grade, Henry Molaison was given a 30-minute airplane ride at the local airfield near his home in Connecticut. His father watched with excitement and pride as the boy climbed into the aircraft and sat on the green leather front seat. His mother, also in attendance for the occasion, wiped tears from her eyes. Tears due to a mixture of happiness, and dread.

When the plane touched down 30 minutes later, and elated Henry sprang from the cockpit to tell his waiting parents all about the experience. He recounted the views from above, the excitement of leaving the ground, and the complexity of the controls. The pinnacle of the experience had been when the pilot allowed Henry to take control of the aircraft and make turns above his house. Just as he began to tell his parents about it, his eyes dilated, his body stiffened, and he lost consciousness. The excitement of the flight had triggered another seizure in Henry. Something he had been plagued by since a bicycle accident at age 7.

It was never quite clear if the bicycle accident was the only cause of Henry’s epilepsy. But it was soon after the incident that he began having regular seizures. The frequency started small, but soon grew to 10 or more per day. The family did their best to manage the seizures with medication, however over time the intensity and frequency increased, and he was put on much higher doses of the medication to manage the problem.

Henry somehow managed to graduate high school and did his best to lead a normal life. While he was never able to leave his parents’ home, he was able to hold a steady job at a typewriter factory in town. This lasted until Henry reached the age of 27, when the severity of the seizures became too intense for the medication to manage. Desperate for options, Henry enlisted the help of William Scoville, a neurosurgeon at Hartford Hospital.

The surgery was new. It was experimental, and it came with many risks. Dr. Scoville theorized that seizures stemmed from a malfunction in the hippocampus, a small piece of your brain about the size of your thumb, located on either side of the brain. Prior patients had undergone a similar procedure having one of their two hippocampi removed, and the results had been mostly positive. But Henry’s seizures were more severe than theirs had been, and as such, Dr. Scoville wanted to be more aggressive, and remove both.

On September 1, 1953, Henry lay on an operating table. The brain has no pain receptors, so only local anesthesia had been needed for Scoville to make the cuts into Henry’s skull. Dr. Scoville talked to Henry all throughout the surgery, asking him about favorite memories, his friends, his job etc. Henry spoke right back as the Dr, poked and prodded his brain with small electrical impulses. Finally, confident that the hippocampi were indeed the root cause of the seizures, Dr. Scoville removed both, and closed Henry’s skull.

Henry blinked as he slowly woke up in his hospital room after the surgery. He didn’t recognize the room. He really wasn’t even sure why he was there. Some confusion like this is normal after a brain surgery. At first, the nurses tending to him thought nothing of it. But this almost four weeks after his surgery, and still, every time Henry woke up, he was unsure where he was. He didn’t remember the names of his Dr, or nurses. He couldn’t even recall that he had been operated on. He knew he had a brain surgery scheduled for the future, but he was completely unaware that it had already happened.

As time went on, Dr.’s tried to find answers. Henry was so…unusual. He was not a complete amnesiac. His childhood memories were completely intact. He could recount in great detail stories from his youth, including his personal favorite story of his airplane ride. He recognized people he knew from before his surgery. He recognized his parent’s. home, and even his workplace. His memory seemed just fine. He just couldn’t make new memories.

I wish I could finish this story by telling you that Henry eventually made a full recovery. That he was able to make new connections in his brain that allowed him to overcome his difficulties. But he didn’t. Henry lived until the age of 82, passing away in 2008. The entire time he thought he was 27. He was by all accounts an extremely gracious and gentle person. Quick to smile, and happy with his lot in life. From the age of 27 on, he never made a new friend. He never gained a new skill. He was trapped forever with just his memories from his first 27 years of life.

Henry was also one of the greatest contributions to neuroscience the world has ever seen. The Doctors studying his brain were able to answer many of the questions that had eluded them for decades. They made discoveries including the differentiation of short vs long term memory. They found the distention between muscle memory, emotional memory, and just regular memory. After his death, the dissection of his brain (Henry, and his legal guardian had agreed to this in 1992) was live streamed to an audience of over 400,000. In both his life, and his death, Henry alone, has done more to advance the field of neurology than any other person, yet sadly, he had no idea.

While to most on the outside the life of Henry Molaison seemed like a tragedy, let us remember one thing. To everyone who knew him, he was happy. He did not let his lack of a short-term memory hold him back.

Those of us who do have short term memories, could often do well to use them a little less. Make no mistake, I am grateful for my brains ability to retain new information. But sometimes, that ability to retain information can backfire on us. We are subject to biases like sunk cost, and recency bias, because our brains remember painful events of the past so vividly. Learning to fight those biases, is a vital skill, in your person, professional, and financial life.

Recency bias causes us to make poor investment decisions because we are prone to assuming that what happened most recently, will happen again. Sunk cost bias causes us to hold on to a bad investment too long or continue with a faulty plan to long, because we have invested too much in it to just give up. Learn to master your mind, and avoid these pitfalls, and more, and you will find yourself enjoying more success in all areas of your life. If and when you do master those biases, make sure to take a moment to thank Henry, because he is the reason we even know these biases exist.