Patient H.M.: A Story of Memory, Madness, and Family Secrets

Maybe the human brain is an object beyond the reach of metaphor, for the simple reason that it is the only object capable of creating metaphors to describe itself. There really is nothing else like it. The human brain creates the human mind, and then the human mind tries to underhand the human brain, however long it takes and whatever the cost.

The broken illuminate the unbroken.

Memory scientists have a word to describe those sorts of moments, when something in the immediate present triggers the recollection of something in the distant past: ecphory.

My grandfather, like most lobotomists, performed a disproportionate number of psychosurgeries on women. This discrepancy never received a satisfactory explanation, but it seems worth pointing out that the known clinical effects of lobotomy—including tractability, passivity, and docility—overlapped nicely with what many men of the time considered to be ideal feminine traits.

Memories make us. Everything we are is everything we were.