BIO SCI 38 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Donald O. Hebb, Brenda Milner, William Beecher Scoville
11 Jan 2020
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Document Summary
The person whose tragedy led us to appreciate the central role of the hippocampus to declarative memory. Started having seizures after a bicycle accident at age 7. Seizures got worse into adolescence and early adulthood. Surgery in 1953 at age 27 by neurosurgeon dr. william scoville. Bilateral resection of hippocampus and other structures of the medial temporal lobe (mtl; including amygdala and entorhinal cortices) The surgery did stop the seizures, but resulted in profound anterograde & graded retrograde amnesia for declarative memories. He was studied for decades by 100s of researchers, but most prominently. Analysis of subjects with specific brain lesions reveals distinct forms of ltm that involve specific brain regions. The synaptic plasticity hypothesis: the strength of a synaptic connection can be modified by experience. The term plasticity was used by william james to suggest that the brain could be modified by experience, but he did not provide insight regarding mechanism.
