Corkin met Henry for the first time that week. She shook hands with him and his mother in a hallway at the Neuro, then led Henry back to a testing room. They made small talk, chatting about Hartford, their mutual hometown. Corkin’s mom had once attended St. Peter’s school, just like Henry, and Corkin was born at Hartford Hospital in 1937, just sixteen years before Patient H.M. was born, in a manner of speaking, in my grandfather’s operating room. Henry was eleven years older than Corkin, and the two came from vastly different backgrounds—Henry was firmly working-class, while Corkin would describe her own upbringing as privileged—but there were common threads of experience. After talking for a little while, Corkin sat Henry down at a table and pulled up a chair across from him. On the table was her tactually guided maze, although a screen was placed in front of it so Henry could not see it. Corkin explained the procedure. She gave Henry the stylus, then took hold of his hand and brought it to the start of the maze. She gently guided it through to the finish, to give him a basic orientation, then brought his hand back to the start, released it, and picked up her stopwatch and her bell. Henry began.
The first time he navigated the maze he made almost exactly eighty errors, each eliciting one ring of Corkin’s bell. The second and third time he made slightly fewer errors, and on his tenth attempt he made additional improvements, committing only seventy-two errors. The eleventh time, however, his score regressed: He made the wrong move more than eighty times. Corkin tested him on the maze over a period of two days, observing him over dozens and dozens of attempts, and by the end he had shown no net improvement in terms of the number of errors he was making. Henry’s amnesia evidently completely prevented him from memorizing the correct path through the maze. This was not surprising. When reviewing the data later, however, Corkin noticed something: Although Henry’s overall rate of errors never improved, the time it took him to complete the maze did. On his first attempt, it took him about ninety seconds. On his final attempt, it took him less than forty. So although he clearly hadn’t learned the maze itself, he had learned something. Specifically he became more adept at the physical procedure of navigating the maze, of guiding a stylus around a hidden track. Like most people, he moved the stylus in a slow, cumbersome way at first, but by the end he was moving it quickly and confidently. This was in some ways similar to Henry’s results on Milner’s mirror tracing test: It was another proof that his procedural memory, his memory of how to do things, was intact. The exciting difference, however, was that Corkin’s tactually guided maze actually demonstrated both Henry’s intact procedural memory and his demolished episodic memory simultaneously. For the first time, in one elegant experiment, Henry’s strengths and Henry’s weaknesses were both laid bare.
For a young graduate student like Corkin, it was a thrilling moment. It was also a pivotal one: Although she didn’t know it at the time, and Henry never would, those first sessions were the start of the most intensive relationship between a research subject and a researcher in the history of science. Corkin delivered her PhD thesis—“Somesthetic Function After Focal Cerebral Damage in Man”—in July 1964, and although Henry made only a brief cameo in that thesis, he was just beginning a starring role in Corkin’s career.
—
After graduating from McGill, Corkin moved from Montreal back to New England, accepting a position in the psychology department of MIT. The department was brand-new: A German immigrant named Hans-Lukas Teuber had founded it that same year, and Corkin was one of the first people he recruited. Teuber came to MIT by way of Harvard and New York University and had built his reputation on the careful study of lesion patients, though in his case most of the lesions he was studying were the products of war, not surgery. Most of his research subjects up to that time had been veterans, men who’d sustained penetrating head wounds of one sort or another, and Teuber had proved brilliant at teasing out the various ways their damaged brains affected them and extrapolating what that said about how normal brains worked. As he put it, he considered brain injuries “experiments of nature” and was a passionate advocate for the value of “studying the disturbances of brain function as a clue to normal modes of central nervous system functioning.” He aimed to import and instill this passion for the lesion method to his new department at MIT.
Corkin was a natural fit. Like her new boss, she, too, had amassed a great deal of useful experience working with lesion patients. Unlike Teuber’s patients, most of the research subjects Corkin had worked with were not “accidents of nature” but instead the willful products of surgery, and one of them, Patient H.M., was already clearly among the most important lesion patients in history. There was a word that scientists had begun using to describe him. They called him pure. The purity in question didn’t have anything to do with morals or hygiene. It was entirely anatomical. My grandfather’s resection had produced a living, breathing test subject whose lesioned brain provided an opportunity to probe the neurological underpinnings of memory in unprecedented ways. The unlikelihood that a patient like Henry could ever have come to be without an act of surgery was important. As Corkin herself explained years later, it would be hard to conceive of, for example, the soldiers Teuber was accustomed to studying, men who’d been shot in the head, winding up with brains similar to Henry’s: “To get a pure one would be rare. Because think about what it would take to blow out both hippocampi. You’d be dead. I think it would be most compatible with not being alive.”
Teuber recognized Henry’s importance, which meant he also recognized the importance of Corkin’s access to Henry, not to mention her personal relationship with Brenda Milner and William Beecher Scoville. By hiring Corkin, Teuber was acquiring not only a first-rate scientist practiced in his beloved lesion method but also by extension the world’s premier lesion patient. Indeed, shortly after Corkin signed on at MIT, Teuber drove to my grandfather’s office in Hartford for the first of many visits. Henry was waiting for him there, and Henry and Teuber drove back to Cambridge together. They parked outside a new redbrick building called the Clinical Research Center, and Teuber led Henry inside to a small bedroom where he would live for the next two weeks. During the four decades that followed that first visit, Henry made fifty-four individual trips to the Clinical Research Center, sometimes staying for as long as a month. A mountain of clinical data began piling up, the beginning of what would become the largest amount of data ever gathered on a single research subject. Still, for Henry, his new home never became any less bewildering than it was for him that first week, when three times he rang for a nurse in the middle of the night and posed an apologetic question.
“Where am I?” Henry asked. “And how did I come to be here?”
—
Hans-Lukas Teuber drowned during a vacation in the Virgin Islands in 1977.
By that point, Brenda Milner at McGill had largely ceded control of Henry-related research to MIT. Doing so made sense on a number of levels. For one thing, Hartford, where Henry lived, was much closer to Cambridge than to Montreal. For another, Milner had in many ways moved on. Her early work with Henry led directly to two groundbreaking discoveries: one, that memory function was localizable to a particular part of the brain, and two, that the brain contained at least two different and independent memory systems. That, for Milner, was enough. She was still deeply curious, still actively engaged in research, and still working with brain-lesioned patients at the Neuro, but her interests were increasingly migrating forward from the medial temporal lobes to the frontal lobes. She’d discovered Patient H.M. and made him famous, which made her famous in turn. Now she could let him go. Truth be told, it wasn’t all that hard, on a personal level. Henry’s memory deficits, his incessant repetition of the same stories, his inability to remember Milner or anyone else, made it difficult to establish anything but a superficial bond with him. “We found ourselves beginning to regard him the way you would regard a pet,” Milner once told an interviewer. “He lost his humanness. You can’t build a friendship or any sort of human affection for
the person.”
After Teuber’s death, Corkin became the lead investigator for Patient H.M., a position she would hold until his death. In a book she wrote about Henry, Corkin explained the situation like this: “By the late 1970s I had become the primary point of contact for anyone who wanted to access him for research. Hans-Lukas Teuber died in 1977, and Brenda Milner moved on to other research topics while still maintaining a strong interest in Henry. I had inherited him as a patient.” She took her new responsibilities toward Henry seriously, and by all accounts displayed a genuine interest in his well-being. She would send him postcards on holidays, flowers on his birthday. She made sure he never lacked crossword puzzle books. She took good care of him, in her own way.
And Henry, in his own way, took good care of Corkin. Inheriting the world’s most important human research subject was good for Corkin’s career, scientifically and professionally. After Teuber’s death, MIT invited her to head up her own laboratory, and although thousands of different research subjects eventually participated in studies at the new Behavioral Neuroscience Laboratory, Henry was clearly the lab’s most prized asset. Many of the graduate students and postdocs who applied for positions with Corkin did so in the hopes of getting a chance to work with the famous Patient H.M., and over the years more than 22 percent of the papers that came out of the lab were about Henry. Those papers were also the ones that gained the most attention and interest, both among the wider scientific community and the general public. This attention and interest all raised the profile of Corkin and her laboratory, which received millions of dollars in private and federal funding. “I came to realize Henry’s limitless worth as a research participant,” Corkin would later write, adding that “Henry was certainly a boon to my lab’s reputation.”
She became Henry’s gatekeeper, fielding all requests from outside researchers who wanted to work with him. She said that she “felt strongly that Henry should not be made available to every person who wanted to meet him” and that if she had allowed “all interested researchers to test and interview him, the resulting free-for-all would have been a constant drain on his time and energy.” Even within the lab, Corkin imposed strict rules related to the interactions that people were allowed to have with Henry. She forbade photography and video. To this day, no video of Henry has been made public. Jenni Ogden, a neuropsychologist from New Zealand who spent years working in Corkin’s lab, recalls that she once surreptitiously took a few snapshots of Henry while she was running some tests with him in 1986. Years later, long after she’d left the lab to start her own at the University of Auckland, she was having a friendly catch-up chat with Corkin when she mentioned having taken those pictures.
Corkin went silent on the other end of the line.
“I want you to send those pictures to me,” she said finally. “And I want you to destroy the negatives.”
Similarly, when Endel Tulving, one of the world’s leading memory researchers, met Henry he asked Corkin whether he could tape-record their conversation, and she refused. “It’s just silliness,” Tulving said later.
Howard Eichenbaum, a renowned Boston University neuroscientist and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, told me that there were two ways to interpret Corkin’s zealous guardianship of Henry. Eichenbaum usually works with rats, but during the 1980s he and Corkin collaborated on a few papers involving Henry. “Certainly I think she would say that she was hugely protective of Henry,” he said, “but there are two things that are going on.” He explained that when researchers like Corkin gain privileged access to an important human research subject like Henry, they know that “this is their resource, this is where they are going to get their data from.” He contrasted animal-focused researchers such as himself, who “can always order some more rats,” to human-focused researchers such as Corkin, who can never hope to find another Henry. “Everyone who has an amnesic patient guards the access to them,” Eichenbaum said, “because they want to do the experiments on them. They can’t do all those experiments at once, so it’s going to play out over years, and they don’t really want to share.” Eichenbaum said it was inevitable that Corkin and her colleagues would develop possessive feelings toward Henry. “They kind of own, in some sense—although obviously you don’t own people—that resource. They have the contact for that resource, so they want to hold on to that resource to do the experiments herself.”
According to Eichenbaum, Corkin’s fierceness as a gatekeeper was understandable. After all, he said, “her career is based on having that proprietary access.”
—
Memory scientists often speak of the important difference between knowing that a certain fact is true and knowing how you came to learn it. For example, here’s a simple question: What’s the capital of France? The answer probably leapt to your mind in an instant. Now, here’s another question: When exactly did you learn that Paris is the capital of France? If you’re like most people, you have no idea. That particular fact twinkles in your mind amid an enormous constellation of other facts, most of them forever disconnected from the moment they first sprang to life. That store of mostly disconnected facts is known as your semantic memory.
Your semantic memory is contrasted with your episodic memory, which is your memory of fleshed-out narratives rather than merely facts. When you engage your episodic memory, you engage in a form of mental time travel, bringing yourself back to a particular place and time, reimagining a scene you’ve already lived. When you engage your semantic memory you are doing the mental equivalent of flipping through an encyclopedia or photo album, plucking out bits of information whose origins might be unclear. Incidentally, semantic memory can also be autobiographical. You might know for certain that you are capable of walking on your hands without remembering the day you first learned how to do so. In neuroscientific shorthand, this is known as the difference between “knowing that” and “knowing how.”
One of the most remarkable things that came to light during Suzanne Corkin’s research with Henry had to do with this distinction between episodic and semantic memory. Prior to Corkin, the basic understanding of Henry’s amnesia could be summarized as follows: The lesions in his brain prevented him from acquiring any new episodic or semantic memories while the episodic and semantic memories he’d acquired prior to the operation were left more or less intact. As it turned out, this was incorrect. Through a series of experiments, Corkin and her colleagues demonstrated that virtually all of Henry’s episodic memories, even the ones that had been created prior to the operation, either no longer existed or were completely inaccessible to him. He didn’t just have no postoperative episodic memories, he had no episodic memories, period. Instead of being able to do what the rest of us can do—use our minds to reexperience and reexamine many of the stories of our lives—Henry was left with the ability only to rifle through his mind’s files of disconnected facts, never knowing the context or origins of any of them, never stringing them together into real, living narratives. As Corkin put it, Henry’s entire past, even predating the operation, had become “semanticized.”
Although MIT is an institution where scientists have access to all the best and most expensive neuroscientific tools, from MRIs to PETs to EEGs, the way Corkin and her colleagues proved that Henry lacked an ability to access episodic memories was decidedly low-tech. They interviewed him. For hours and hours, they sat and asked him about his past. Henry could easily recall his date of birth—two twenty-six, twenty-six—but now they asked if he could describe a specific birthday party, any birthday party ever. It turned out he could not. He could pull up facts about himself, about his family, about the world—but he couldn’t string these facts together into episodes, narratives, stories. This basic deficit, and his seeming efforts to compensate for and talk around it, was heartbreaking.
“What is your favorite memory of your mother?” Corkin once asked Henry during an interview in 1992.
“Well, I—that she’s my mother.”
“But can you reme
mber any particular event that was special—like a holiday, Christmas, birthday, Easter?”
“There I have an argument about myself about Christmastime.”
“What about Christmas?”
“Well, ’cause my daddy was from the South, and they didn’t celebrate down there like they do up here—in the North. Like they don’t have trees or anything like that. And, uh, but he came north even though he was born in Louisiana. And I know the name of the town he was born in.”
Another researcher once asked Henry if he’d ever fallen in love. He told her that he had.
“Okay, tell me about it.”
“Well, just how you felt and everything and the ways it could be. And they would fall for you. And you still don’t know.”
“Can you tell me about when you first felt that you were falling in love with somebody? One specific event?”
“No.”
“No, you can’t think of that? Can you think of one specific event lasting for several hours from your early childhood? Can you come up with anything like that?”
“No, I can’t.”
Henry’s almost complete lack of episodic memories is difficult to relate to. We are a storytelling species, and we spend a great deal of our time stringing the facts of our pasts into narratives in the present. A mind unable to do so can seem like a fundamentally alien mind. Forgetfulness is one thing—we’ve all got porous memories—but the deficits Henry endured are something else altogether. It may in fact be impossible to know what it was like to experience life through Henry’s eyes, from within Henry’s mind, but it’s important to remember that most of the episodes from our own lives become semanticized over time, bleached of their context. My own episodic memory, for example, has countless pits and gulfs and vacuums.
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