[2008.12.20] 他忘记了自己，而我们永远记住了他

Obituary
逝者

H.M.
他忘记了自己，而我们永远记住了他

Dec 18th 2008
From The Economist print edition

Henry Molaison, a man without memories, died on December 2nd, aged 82
无忆人亨利. 莫莱森于十二月二日去世，享年八十二岁。

EACH time Suzanne Corkin met H.M. during one of his visits to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, she would ask him if they had met before. He would smile and say yes, and when she asked him where he would reply, “In high school.” They did not actually meet until he was in his late 30s, but they worked together for nearly five decades, and the last time they met he still failed to recognise her. The most she ever elicited in him was a sense of familiarity.

每当在麻省理工学院看到H.M.，苏珊.柯林都会问我们见过吗。H.M.点头微笑。柯林接着问，在哪儿呢？他会回答：”在高中”。而事实上H.M.将近四十岁才遇见柯林。虽然此后共事近半个世纪，但直至最后一次见面，H.M.都无法认出对方，充其量也只是似曾相识的感觉。

More extraordinary still, a sense of familiarity was all his own face elicited in him. People were fascinated by H.M., for whom life came to a standstill in 1953, and one of the questions they always asked about him was what happened when he looked in the mirror. Dr Corkin reports that there was no change in his facial expression, his conversation continued in a matter-of-fact tone and he did not seem upset-though this could have been because of the damage done to his amygdalas, brain structures that are important for processing emotion. Once, in the later years, when she asked him what he was thinking as he gazed at his reflection, he replied, “I’m not a boy.”

更离奇的是，看着镜子里的自己，H.M.绞尽脑汁也只能勾起一份熟稔。1953年，H.M.的人生陷入静止，引发人们的浓厚兴趣，常常问他从镜子里看到了什么。在柯林的报告中，H.M.的表情一如往常，语调平稳，看不出沮丧的情绪–不过这可能因为杏仁体受损，导致脑组织中这个负责处理感情的重要部位无法工作。后来，柯林问H.M.照镜子时做何感想，他答道”：我不小了”。

H.M., or Henry M.-his family name was kept secret until he died-grew up in the countryside outside Hartford, Connecticut. He was 16 when he suffered his first grand malepileptic seizure. The fits became more frequent, delaying his graduation from high school and, later, preventing him from holding down a job, though he tried to work on an assembly line.

H.M.或者亨利. 莫氏成长于康乃狄格州的哈特福特市乡间。十六岁时，他首次表现出极度癫痫的症状。随后，癫痫愈加频繁，导致他未能按时高中毕业，并在流水线上做过一阵后遭到解雇。

By the time he was 27 he was having as many as 11 seizures a week and was on near-toxic doses of anti-convulsants. His desperate parents were referred to William Beecher Scoville, a neurosurgeon at Hartford Hospital. It was 1953 and psychosurgery-which was later to be banned, or at least restricted, in many countries-was at the height of its popularity. Scoville himself had performed frontal lobotomies, though he was dissatisfied with the way they blunted his patients’ emotions.

到了27岁，癫痫发作的频率已是每周十一次之多，他也开始服用抗痉挛药物，剂量之大几近中毒。走投无路之下，父母找到了哈特福特医院的神经外科医生斯考维勒。当时是1953年，精神外科学风头正劲（后遭多国禁止、限制），而斯考维勒曾主刀前脑叶白质切除手术，虽然他不愿这些组织使病人的情感钝化。

In some ways H.M. was a product of that dissatisfaction, because Scoville had been working on a new, experimental operation, and he decided to try it on H.M. He would remove his medial temporal lobes (one on each side of the brain), the presumed origin of his seizures. Each lobe includes an amygdala and a seahorse-shaped structure called the hippocampus.

从某种层面上，H.M.是斯考维勒这份不满的产物。由于正研究一项新型实验手术，H.M.的出现为他提供了实验对象。据他推测，内侧颞叶（左右脑各一个）是导致H.M.癫痫的病因，并打算将其切除。颞叶每端各包含一个杏仁体和名叫海马回的海马状组织。

The operation was successful: H.M. experienced only two serious seizures during the subsequent year. But this happy outcome came at a terrible price. From the date of the operation he was unable to form new memories, and he also lost many of the memories he had laid down before it. Although he could recall the Wall Street crash and the second world war, he was left with no autobiographical memories at all. Having seen the effects of his handiwork, a shocked Scoville began to campaign against the operation. This meant that H.M. was the only person ever to undergo it.

手术成功了，H.M.的癫痫只重犯了两次，而H.M.却付出了惨痛的代价。H.M.的大脑自手术之日起停止了记忆构成，许多术前的记忆如今也不复存在。虽然对金融危机、二次世界大战仍然保有印象，H.M.脑海中关于自己的一切记忆已经烟消云散。看着一手酿成的结局，斯考维勒震惊之下开始抵制内侧颞叶摘除手术。从此，H.M.成为唯一接受过这项手术的病人。

Tracing a star
绘星

Two years later Scoville invited Brenda Milner, a neuropsychologist who had been studying post-operative amnesia, to come and study H.M. Her work had led her to suspect that the hippocampus was important for forming memories, and that it might be the place where they are stored. In the decades that followed, the experiments that first she and then her student Dr Corkin conducted with H.M. produced a more complex picture.

两年后，斯考维勒邀请神经心理学家米尔纳共同研究。米尔纳的主攻领域是术后失忆，她推测海马回是形成并储存记忆的重要部位。在接下来的几十年内，她和学生柯林博士对H.M.进行了一系列实验，结果比她的推测更加复杂。

One of the most striking experiments had H.M. tracing a star between two parallel lines, when he could see his drawing hand only in a mirror. With practice his performance improved, though he always denied having attempted the task before. This led Dr Milner to propose a distinction between procedural memory (memory for a skill) and declarative memory (conscious recall of having used that skill), and to suggest that the two are stored in different places. Thanks to H.M., the scientists also learned that the hippocampus is crucial in forming some long-term memories, but not for maintaining or retrieving them.

在各项试验中，最令人震惊的要数绘星试验。按照要求，H.M.只能通过镜子里反射的影像来描绘两条平行线之间的一颗星形图案。几次练习之后，他虽然画得像模像样了，却不承认自己曾经挑战过这项任务。由此米尔纳推测，程序性记忆和陈述性记忆分别存储在不同部位，并提出了它们的区别。通过H.M.的案例，科学家们得知海马回虽然对部分长期记忆的形成具有重要作用，却没有保持或恢复功能。

It has often been said that a man with no memory can have no sense of self. Both Dr Milner and Dr Corkin disagree. H.M. had a sense of humour, even if he was capable of telling the same anecdote three times in 15 minutes. He was polite, and would cup Dr Corkin’s elbow as they walked around MIT. Everybody liked him, though it was a temptation for those who knew him to patronise him, to treat him like a favourite child or pet, such was the inequality of his and their knowledge about his life. It was a temptation, Dr Milner says, that they struggled against daily.

人们常说，一个人没有记忆就不具备自体感受。对此，米尔纳和柯林博士不以为然。H.M.就具有幽默感，尽管一刻钟之内他能把同一个笑话讲上三遍。H.M. 举止有礼貌，在校内散步时会挽着柯林博士的手臂。大家都喜欢H.M.，虽然这是出于看客的嘲弄喜好，像逗狗或逗小孩儿一样。不公平的是，H.M.对自己的情况还不如外界了解得多。米尔纳说，她们每天都要抵制这样的嘲弄喜好。

H.M. held no grudge against Dr Scoville. In fact, he dreamed of becoming a neurosurgeon, though he always said that could never happen, because blood spurting from the incision would cloud his glasses, preventing him from doing his best for the patient. By the time this obituary appears he will have gone under the knife again, this time for an autopsy. Before long his brain will appear in three digitised dimensions on the internet, for researchers to pore over. He never knew how much he contributed to science, says Dr Corkin, but if someone had told him it would have given him a warm, fuzzy feeling-for a few seconds, at least.

H.M.对斯考维勒并无芥蒂。事实上，他曾梦想成为一名神经外科医生。不过他也总说这不现实，因为从伤口喷涌而出的血液会布满面罩，妨碍他全力施救。完稿之时，他必已再次躺在刀锋之下，这回是解剖刀。不久他的大脑就会以3D形式上传至网络，供研究人员详细观察。柯林博士说，对于科学做出了多大贡献，H.M.自己从不知道。但若有人告诉他这件事，那将是一段温暖、模糊的记忆–哪怕只有几秒。

译者：hunt.lee1987　　http://www.ecocn.org/bbs/viewthread.php?tid=16240&extra=page%3D1