Patient H.M. (32 page)

They talked for a little while about other movie stars that Henry remembered. Gary Cooper. Myrna Loy. Jimmy Stewart.

Ogden changed the subject then, deciding to see what Henry could tell her about someone who was not a public figure but who nevertheless loomed large in Henry's life.

In 1973, Suzanne Corkin tried to figure out if Henry had difficulty detecting ambiguity. She presented him with a sentence: “The marine captain liked his new position.” The sentence could be interpreted in at least two different ways, and she asked Henry whether he could describe those two meanings to her.

They go back and forth for a while, until it's clear that Henry isn't going to come up with the alternate meaning Corkin is fishing for. So she tells it to him. She explains that apart from the interpretation Henry is making—the Marine captain liked his new job—you could also interpret the sentence as meaning that the captain liked his new position, in a literal, physical sense. That he had just sat down, for example, and liked the feeling of being seated.

What Corkin said was true, of course: Words have fluid meanings, and can always be interpreted in different ways. This was certainly true in the case of Henry's own words, which were pored over by generations of scientists, scrutinized like the words of a prophet, wielded in support of different and sometimes contradictory belief systems.

Donald MacKay, a cognitive psychologist and psycholinguist, studied Henry's words as intently, and as fiercely, as anyone. He began working with Henry as an MIT graduate student in the late 1960s and early 1970s and continued to do so after he left MIT to take a position with the UCLA department of psychology. He wrote more than a dozen journal articles that explored Henry's way of speaking and claimed to find a variety of persistent deficits in Henry's ability to formulate coherent and contextually appropriate sentences. MacKay's criticisms could be opaque to nonlinguists—one typical paper spent pages chronicling the subtle differences between Henry's “major violations of miscellaneous conjunction constraints” and his “major violations of copular conjunction complement restraints”—but as a whole the articles provided compelling evidence that Henry did have an unusually hard time expressing himself logically and grammatically.

For example, in the 1990s, Lori James, one of MacKay's graduate students, showed Henry a picture that depicted one man rock climbing while two other men looked on. One of the men on the ground was pointing at the rock climber. James asked Henry to formulate a sentence describing the scene, and to use the words
fall
and
leg
in that sentence. Normal controls tended to produce a sentence along the lines of “The man is telling him not to fall and break his leg.”

Not all researchers agreed with MacKay that Henry's “errors in novel spoken discourse were so severe as to render his output incoherent and incomprehensible,” but most people who worked with Henry noticed that he had at the very least some language problems. There was disagreement over the origins of these problems, however. MacKay believed that they were likely the result of Henry's brain lesions, while Corkin speculated that Henry's “mild language disorder…might have preceded the operation, and could be related to substandard education and low socioeconomic background.”

Then, in 2005, a group of researchers from Duke University published an article that presented a dramatically contrary view: They concluded that Henry didn't have any language problems at all. After interviewing Henry for several hours over three days, they failed to see “the language deficits noted previously. Instead, H.M.'s level of oral usage was remarkably competent.” They noted that their findings “contradicted other studies of H.M.'s language” and singled out MacKay's work, declaring their own to be a “more ecologically valid analysis of H.M.'s language skills,” in part because they had conducted their interview in Henry's “familiar home environment” rather than “in unfamiliar laboratory studies.”

They included several excerpts from their interviews with Henry to support their claim, including this exchange, which came after they asked Henry whether there was anything at all he'd like to tell them.

MacKay responded to the Duke paper with what passes in academia as a full-frontal assault, taking issue with what he saw as the “procedural flaws” throughout, from “statistical errors” to an “inadequate control group” to the fact that the evidence they'd presented consisted of a few short excerpts from an unpublished transcript covering five to six hours of conversation. “A selective focus on examples favoring the no-major-errors hypothesis is problematic,” MacKay wrote, “because science can only progress as an empirical enterprise by seeking
counterexamples
and analyzing them in detail.” The most lacerating portion of MacKay's paper, however, was when he used the work of the Duke researchers against them, arguing that even their own cherry-picked excerpts contained evidence of major verbal problems on Henry's part. He pointed out that in the exchange above, for example, Henry's statement that “what's learned about me will help others be” doesn't make grammatical sense. MacKay also pointed out that, grammatical or not, Henry's seemingly altruistic statement was one that he had been repeating ad nauseam for decades, in almost any context. MacKay cited examples of Henry giving basically the same response to questions ranging from “Are you happy?” to “How are you feeling?” to “Where do you think you are?” to “What aspect of remembering are you wondering about?”

“Repeating the same response to so many different questions,” MacKay wrote, “seemed abnormal.”

Everyone who worked with Henry grew familiar with those sorts of stock phrases and anecdotes, the building blocks of his conversations. Again and again he would tell the scientists about how what they learned from him would help others, about camping in Vermont, about crossword puzzles, about his desire to be a neurosurgeon, and he'd pepper these chestnuts with all his familiar verbal tics:
in a way…an argument with myself…I guess…right off…
As Henry grew older, and more famous, he became in some ways like an aging rock star, periodically hauled onstage to deliver his greatest hits to his fans, the neuroscientists who studied him. Sometimes even his fans grew sick of hearing those same old songs. Alice Cronin-Golomb, one of Corkin's graduate students in the late 1980s, was often tasked with driving Henry back and forth between Cambridge and Hartford, and in an essay she wrote about the experience she recalled how she was maybe “the only person to actively try to keep his memory from working.”

“During those drives,” she wrote, “there was a highway sign for Chicopee Falls, which would always cue him to say ‘Chicopee Falls? I had an aunt in Chicopee Falls!' And I'd be listening to the same story time after time. One time I just couldn't bear the thought of hearing the story again, so when I saw the sign before he did I yelled, ‘Henry! Look over there!' and pointed in the direction opposite the sign so he wouldn't get that cue.”

As time passed, even as Henry's fame grew greater, even as the articles about him accumulated, even as the spats over his strengths and weaknesses flared, there was one other way in which he resembled an aging rock star: His best days were long past. Scientifically speaking, the basic discoveries that Brenda Milner made during her first afternoons with Henry were unquestionably more important than any discoveries made by the legions of other scientists who worked with Henry during the six decades that followed.