Book Review by Mike Jay-Permanent Present Tense: The Man with No Memory, and What He Taught the World by Suzanne Corkin

Memory creates our identity, but it also exposes the illusion of a coherent self: a memory is not a thing but an act that alters and rearranges even as it retrieves. Although some of its operations can be trained to an astonishing pitch, most take place autonomously, beyond the reach of the conscious mind. As we age, it distorts and foreshortens: present experience becomes harder to impress on the mind, and the long-forgotten past seems to draw closer; University Challenge gets easier, remembering what you came downstairs for gets harder. Yet if we were somehow to freeze our memory at the youthful peak of its powers, around our late twenties, we would not create a polished version of ourselves analogous to a youthful body, but an early, scrappy draft composed of childhood memories and school-learning, barely recognisable to our older selves.

Something like this happened to the most famous case of amnesia in 20th-century science, a man known only as ‘H.M.’ until his death in 2008. When he was 27, a disastrous brain operation destroyed his ability to form new memories, and he lived for the next 55 years in a rolling thirty-second loop of awareness, a ‘permanent present tense’. During this time he was subjected to thousands of hours of tests, of which naturally he had no recall; he provided data for hundreds of scientific papers, and became the subject of a book (Memory’s Ghost by Philip Hilts) and a staple of popular science journalism; by the 1990s digital images of his uniquely disfigured hippocampus featured in almost every standard work on the neuroscience of memory. Since his death his brain has been shaved into 2401 slices, each 70 microns thick, compared in one account to the slivers of ginger served with sushi. Suzanne Corkin, an MIT neuroscientist, first met him in 1962 and after 1980 became his lead investigator and ‘sole keeper’. Permanent Present Tense is her account of Henry Gustave Molaison – his full identity can finally be revealed – and the historic contribution he made to science.

Unwittingly snatching ‘dreams’ from the recesses of his waking mind was consistent with the ways Henry, always intelligent and perceptive, became adept at filling the gaps in his memory with hunches and canny guesswork. Sometimes this would baffle his researchers: one day he astonished Corkin by knowing that he was in the MIT laboratories, only to reveal that he had deduced his location from a passing student’s sweatshirt. When asked a question beyond the reach of his memory, he would often pause and then reply, ‘I’m having an argument with myself’: a range of possible answers would come to him, whether from intuition, partial recall or informed guesswork, but he would have no means of deciding between them. Although he was unable to recall specific events, regular routines would prompt him in ways that eluded conscious recognition: walking a familiar route, he might turn the correct way without knowing he had done so. A situation that recurred often enough seemed to create a ghostly outline. In 1977, after the death of Henry’s father, a lab researcher noticed that he kept in his wallet a handwritten note to himself – ‘Dad’s dead’ – to anchor his recurring feeling of absence. Click Link for full article;

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n10/mike-jay/argument-with-myself

Posted By F. Sheikh