Word: brain
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...patients with Huntington's disease, it's the part of the brain called the basal ganglia that's destroyed. While these victims have perfectly intact explicit memory systems, they can't learn new motor skills. An Alzheimer's patient can learn to draw in a mirror but can't remember doing it; a Huntington's patient can't do it but can remember trying to learn. Yet another region of the brain, an almond-size knot of neural tissue known as the amygdala, seems to be crucial in forming and triggering the recall of a special subclass of memories that...
...even as psychologists and brain researchers have learned to appreciate memory's central role in our mental lives, they have come to realize that memory is not a single phenomenon. "We do not have a memory system in the brain," says James McGaugh, director of the Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory at the University of California, Irvine. "We have memory systems, each playing a different role...
...other side of town comes from another; the nervous feeling you have left over from taking a bad spill last time out comes from still another. Yet you are never aware that your mental experience has been assembled, bit by bit, like some invisible edifice inside your brain...
...brain researchers might never have picked up on the fragmentary nature of memory without their studies of people whose memory has been damaged by illness or injury. The most celebrated such individual is H.M. In 1953, when he was 27, he had drastic brain surgery to cure severe epilepsy. The operation cured his epilepsy, but removing parts of his brain's temporal lobes, including a structure called the hippocampus, destroyed his ability to form new memories. H.M., who is still alive, has a reasonably good short-term memory. Once introduced to a visitor, he will remember the person's name...
...very specific sort. For many days running, she asked him to trace a design while looking in a mirror. As far as H.M. knew, the task was a brand-new one each time he confronted it. Yet as the days wore on, his performance improved. Some part of his brain was retaining a memory of an earlier practice session, a so-called implicit--rather than explicit, or consciously remembered--memory. People who suffer from Alzheimer's disease exhibit the same sort of behavior--and it's the medial temporal lobe that is first affected by this devastating disease...