Here's the lede: "When a surgeon cut into Henry Molaison's skull to treat him for epilepsy, he inadvertently created the most important brain-research subject of our time — a man who could no longer remember, who taught us everything we know about memory. Six decades later, another daring researcher is cutting into Henry's brain. Another revolution in brain science is about to begin."
"The photograph, two months old, was taken during another late night at the lab. It shows a bladed machine, a cryomicrotome, similar to a meat slicer in a deli. The machine holds a block of frozen gelatin and the block of frozen gelatin holds a brain. Annese had sheared the whole brain into 2,401 seventy-micron-thin slices, the camera snapping once before each pass of the blade, and this particular image captures the moment before he sheared off the slice that now floats before him. The picture provides a useful comparison for Annese now, showing the slice as it looked in situ."
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"He began experimenting, at asylums in and around Hartford, with procedures he called "fractional lobotomies," attempting to target only the specific brain structures he believed were implicated in a particular patient's problems. Soon he was reporting a "most gratifying improvement in depressions, psycho-neuroses and tension states without any gross blunting of personality." And he mused about possible future advances and refinements to his approach, wondering whether his experiments in targeted brain lesioning might "bring us one blind step nearer" to the locations of the "fundamental mechanisms of mental disease and of epilepsy.""
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"In 1848, an explosion drives a steel tamping bar through the skull of a twenty-five-year-old railroad foreman named Phineas Gage, obliterating a portion of his frontal lobes. He recovers, and seems to possess all his earlier faculties, with one exception: The formerly mild-mannered Gage is now something of a hellion, an impulsive shit-starter. Ipso facto, the frontal lobes must play some function in regulating and restraining our more animalistic instincts."
"In 1861, a French neurosurgeon named Pierre-Paul Broca announces that he has found the root of speech articulation in the brain. He bases his discovery on a patient of his, a man with damage to the left hemisphere of his inferior frontal lobe. The man comes to be known as "Monsieur Tan," because, though he can understand what people say, "tan" is the only syllable he is capable of pronouncing."
"Thirteen years later, Carl Wernicke, a German neurologist, describes a patient with damage to his posterior left temporal lobe, a man who speaks fluently but completely nonsensically, unable to form a logical sentence or understand the sentences of others. If "Broca's area," as the damaged part of Monsieur Tan's brain came to be known, was responsible for speech articulation, then "Wernicke's area" must be responsible for language comprehension."
"And so it goes. The broken illuminate the unbroken."
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