amnesia
neurophilosophy | December 13, 2009
IN February of this year, Jacopo Annese (above), a neuroanatomist and radiologist at the University of California, San Diego travelled to Boston to take delivery of a brain. For Annese, collecting brains is not unusual - he is, after all, director of UCSD's Brain Observatory, which will eventually become a comprehensive library of brains donated by people who had neurological conditions such as Alzheimer's Disease, as well as by healthy people of all ages. This time though, the brain he collected was very special: it belonged to the amnesic patient Henry Molaison, who for more than 50 years…
ddobbs | July 9, 2009Both Mind Hacks and Jonah Lehrer took interesting note -- Jonah's the longer, and a pretty nice summary itself -- of the fascinating NY Times piece on ultramarathoner Diane Van Deren, who began running long distances after brain surgery removed much of her right temporal lobe. This gave her a great advantage: the lack of memory of the run behind her, and thus of any dread of the punishment still to come. Downside: significant memory problems, and she can't read a map.
Speaking of memory ...
Newsweek has a good piece on unconscious plagiarism -- that is, how genuine lapses in "source memory…