Suffering From Severe Anterograde Amnesia - 1581 Words

Recollecting some of life’s experiences can be done very accurately at times where we can depict details even after a long period of time. For patient H.M. this is the exact case. Patient H.M. suffered from severe anterograde amnesia. Anterograde amnesia patients quite often show normal memory for events that have occurred prior to the incident. Therefore, making it extremely difficult to recall or store information after the incident has occurred. H.M. had been knocked down by a bicycle at the age of 7, began to have minor seizures at the age of 10, and had major seizures after the age of 16. Patient H.M. had brain surgery in the early 1950’s around the time he had been 27 years old. The surgery had been done to alleviate severe symptoms†¦show more content†¦Two months later, he had no awareness of his father’s death just yet. Eventually, H.M. had a chance to work under protected employment in a state rehab center. After six-months of daily exposure to his job, H.M. is still incapable of describing a job he’s done. Although not being able to describe his job, H.M. had the capability to accurately draw a bungalow he’s been living in for the past eight years. Testing H.M.’s Memory It is apparent that patient H.M.’s memory has not been affected by any general intellectual loss. H.M has severe anterograde amnesia, but surprisingly has spared implicit memory. Implicit memory is a type of memory in which past experiences aid the presentation of a task without mindful awareness of the experiences. There have been many tests conducted on the patient to test this spared memory. Mirror Tracing Task One of the experiments performed on patient H.M. is the star tracing test. Brenda Milner, a neuropsychologist, had H.M. trace a star between two parallel lines, where he could only see his drawing hand in a mirror. With every practice his performance improved (Figure 1), though he always denied having ever done the task before. This experiment led Dr. Milner to believe that there is a distinction between procedural memory and declarative memory, suggesting that the two are stored in dissimilar places. Wisconsin Card Sorting Task Is used to determine H.M.’s competence in abstract reasoning, and the ability to change problem