Question: can brain surgery affect your memory?

Alex Reid answered on 14 Nov 2018: last edited 14 Nov 2018 10:46 am

Hi 245hemp28, great question and yes it can! In fact one of the most famous examples of memory loss in psychology is from a patient called ‘H.M’. He went for surgery because he had extreme epilepsy and they only way to save him was by cutting out some brain structures. The surgery worked but had some major side effects on his memory. This is because a part of his brain called the ‘hippocampus’, a structure deep in your head that does a few things, was removed. The hippocampus (and surrounding areas) are essential for forming short term memories. H.M. had could not form new memories as a result, he was kind of stuck in a loop lasting for about 10 minutes for the rest of his life. However, what is also interesting is that his long term memories before the surgery remained intact! This gave psychologists a big clue as to the fact that short and long term memories can be dependent on different parts of the brain, and that there may be a transfer of memories between these areas over time. Patient H.M. has sadly passed, but he was a hero to science for doing lots of tests for us to explore the above issues. His brain has been preserved for future scientists to study (in fact it was dissected and preserved live on a webcam which I watched). For more information on patient H.M. check out his wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Molaison