April 20, 2016
The Mystery of Memory
...and how a Princetonian with profound amnesia is helping neuroscientists figure it out
Michael Lemonick
an editor at Scientific American; a Visiting Lecturer at Princeton Environmental Institute; and for 20 years an editor at Time Magazine,
where he wrote more than 50 cover stories.
The Mystery of Memory
...and how a Princetonian with profound amnesia is helping neuroscientists figure it out
Michael Lemonick
an editor at Scientific American; a Visiting Lecturer at Princeton Environmental Institute; and for 20 years an editor at Time Magazine,
where he wrote more than 50 cover stories.
Michael Lemonick, Speaker, and Claire Jacobus, Introducer
Minutes of the 29th Meeting of the 74th Year
President Owen Leach presided.
Julia Denny led the Invocation.
Newly elected Members were introduced:
Howard Buckwald
Carl Cangelosi
Julian Kestler
Frank McDougald
Robert Ross
Sandra Shapiro
Lois Shindelman
Robert Teweles
Enice Wilkinson
Shirley Satterfield read the minutes of the April 13 meeting.
Guests introduced were:
Krishna Kodukula, Membership Applicant, by John Riganati
Maggie Sullivan by Jock McFarlane
Lynne Fagles by Landon Jones
Tom Baker by John Kelsey
Ted Poltis by David Atkin
Cecilia Mathews by Michael Mathews
Deaths recorded since April 13:
Alan Hegedus
Alice Whipple
______________________________
On April 20 Michael Lemonick spoke to The Old Guard on The Mystery of Memory. He is an editor at Scientific American, a Visiting Lecturer at the Princeton Environmental Institute, and for 20 years was a writer at Time magazine, where he reported more than 50 cover stories.
He described the history of the experimental research, begun in the mid-20th century and still continuing in part, on three living subjects all with the goal of better understanding the nature, the mechanics and the locus of the memory function in the human brain.
The simplest of the subjects was the lowly sea slug, which has relatively few and very large, even macroscopic, neurons. The slug remembered unpleasant electric shocks as demonstrated by the withdrawal efforts it made upon being touched after experiencing the shocking -- efforts that differed from those it made before being shocked.
The other two subjects were both humans: Henry Molaison and Lonni Sue Johnson. They shared some similarities: both had positive, cheerful personalities that never changed significantly; also, each lost the hippocampus function in their brains. Molaison’s loss occurred when the hippocampus was removed surgically in an attempt to cure him of severe epileptic symptoms that made employment and other interpersonal relationships difficult. Johnson lost her hippocampus function as the result of a near fatal viral encephalitis infection. Perhaps the major difference between these two people was that Molaison’s mental abilities and intellectual interests were pedestrian, while Johnson, who grew up in Princeton and shared Princeton High School years with the speaker, had an extraordinary mental life. She was intelligent, imaginative, creative, energetic, experimental, socially engaged and engaging. She was, for example, an accomplished graphic illustrator (published in and on the covers of such as The New Yorker, and The New York Times), a commercial artist, an accomplished violist, a teacher, a private aircraft pilot and an organic dairy farmer.
While the speaker shared many poignant details of human interest regarding both people, time does not permit including them here. But in both cases the loss of an effective hippocampus resulted in the inability to form new memories and to access a major portion of well entrenched past memories. At the same time, however, there was much less impact on acquired knowledge and physical and mental skills such as vocabulary, speech, reading, graphic art skills, music reading and performance, puzzle solving and even new puzzle creation; and such losses could to a great degree be regenerated through rehabilitative exercises. These two individuals’ cases became classical focal points for medical and psychological researchers from McGill, Johns Hopkins, Princeton Universities and elsewhere.
The fundamental questions at issue are: How does the brain formulate memories? Where does the formulation and storage of the memories take place? And, at the neuron level, how does the process of formation, storage and retrieval work?
The evidence so far, at least as understood by this layperson, is that a new memory is formed when the conscious mind notices a subset of all its sensual stimuli at a moment in time. This triggers an increase in the electric charge among small subsets of the neurons in those parts of the brain specific to each of the relevant senses, and the increased charge intensifies the interaction among those small subsets. These strengthened interconnections are retained in this distributed way along with some sort of time index, presumably. They are further reinforced and strengthened each time the event is recalled.
The memory of an event occurs when the hippocampus calls for and causes all those interconnections sharing a common time index to be collated somewhere in the brain. Without a functioning hippocampus this recollection is not possible, and we call that situation “amnesia.”
Respectfully submitted,
Arthur C. Eschenlauer
Julia Denny led the Invocation.
Newly elected Members were introduced:
Howard Buckwald
Carl Cangelosi
Julian Kestler
Frank McDougald
Robert Ross
Sandra Shapiro
Lois Shindelman
Robert Teweles
Enice Wilkinson
Shirley Satterfield read the minutes of the April 13 meeting.
Guests introduced were:
Krishna Kodukula, Membership Applicant, by John Riganati
Maggie Sullivan by Jock McFarlane
Lynne Fagles by Landon Jones
Tom Baker by John Kelsey
Ted Poltis by David Atkin
Cecilia Mathews by Michael Mathews
Deaths recorded since April 13:
Alan Hegedus
Alice Whipple
______________________________
On April 20 Michael Lemonick spoke to The Old Guard on The Mystery of Memory. He is an editor at Scientific American, a Visiting Lecturer at the Princeton Environmental Institute, and for 20 years was a writer at Time magazine, where he reported more than 50 cover stories.
He described the history of the experimental research, begun in the mid-20th century and still continuing in part, on three living subjects all with the goal of better understanding the nature, the mechanics and the locus of the memory function in the human brain.
The simplest of the subjects was the lowly sea slug, which has relatively few and very large, even macroscopic, neurons. The slug remembered unpleasant electric shocks as demonstrated by the withdrawal efforts it made upon being touched after experiencing the shocking -- efforts that differed from those it made before being shocked.
The other two subjects were both humans: Henry Molaison and Lonni Sue Johnson. They shared some similarities: both had positive, cheerful personalities that never changed significantly; also, each lost the hippocampus function in their brains. Molaison’s loss occurred when the hippocampus was removed surgically in an attempt to cure him of severe epileptic symptoms that made employment and other interpersonal relationships difficult. Johnson lost her hippocampus function as the result of a near fatal viral encephalitis infection. Perhaps the major difference between these two people was that Molaison’s mental abilities and intellectual interests were pedestrian, while Johnson, who grew up in Princeton and shared Princeton High School years with the speaker, had an extraordinary mental life. She was intelligent, imaginative, creative, energetic, experimental, socially engaged and engaging. She was, for example, an accomplished graphic illustrator (published in and on the covers of such as The New Yorker, and The New York Times), a commercial artist, an accomplished violist, a teacher, a private aircraft pilot and an organic dairy farmer.
While the speaker shared many poignant details of human interest regarding both people, time does not permit including them here. But in both cases the loss of an effective hippocampus resulted in the inability to form new memories and to access a major portion of well entrenched past memories. At the same time, however, there was much less impact on acquired knowledge and physical and mental skills such as vocabulary, speech, reading, graphic art skills, music reading and performance, puzzle solving and even new puzzle creation; and such losses could to a great degree be regenerated through rehabilitative exercises. These two individuals’ cases became classical focal points for medical and psychological researchers from McGill, Johns Hopkins, Princeton Universities and elsewhere.
The fundamental questions at issue are: How does the brain formulate memories? Where does the formulation and storage of the memories take place? And, at the neuron level, how does the process of formation, storage and retrieval work?
The evidence so far, at least as understood by this layperson, is that a new memory is formed when the conscious mind notices a subset of all its sensual stimuli at a moment in time. This triggers an increase in the electric charge among small subsets of the neurons in those parts of the brain specific to each of the relevant senses, and the increased charge intensifies the interaction among those small subsets. These strengthened interconnections are retained in this distributed way along with some sort of time index, presumably. They are further reinforced and strengthened each time the event is recalled.
The memory of an event occurs when the hippocampus calls for and causes all those interconnections sharing a common time index to be collated somewhere in the brain. Without a functioning hippocampus this recollection is not possible, and we call that situation “amnesia.”
Respectfully submitted,
Arthur C. Eschenlauer