What H. M. Taught Us Eichenbaum Analysis

In the article, “What H.M. Taught Us” by Howard Eichenbaum was published in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience for Massachuetts Institute of Technology. In his article, he discusses the findings of Suzanne Corkin and her colleagues create a great pathway for the field of psychology to get a better understanding of memory, in this case specifically through studying amnesic patients, including the well-known patient, Henry Molaison. They characterized amnesia as a selective deficit in memory, and further into the future, researchers have come to understand the functional organization of the medial temporal memory system and the functioning of its cognitive processes.
The article indicates that H.M. brought about five main findings: that memory is a “distinct psychological function”, amnesia doesn’t harm …show more content…
H.M. evidently showed to have full intact memory of a normal amount of information over a brief period of time, until he was distracted by intervening mental activities such as being able to normally repeat a phone number and carry on a conversation that had no reference to the past or an event left behind the talk. Several studies support that the hippocampus is highly engaged to train information across brief periods of time and activating the hippocampus contributes to subsequent memory performance. Hippocampal activation can even predict subsequent memory during the acquisition of new information.
The evidence found for amnesia being an impairment of declarative and episodic memory is that amnesia associated with damage to the hippocampus is selective to declarative memory, for example Henry was absent of episodic memory. A core deficit in amnesia is a loss of the ability to distinct memories from one another and to relate distinct elements of memories. Unfortunately, this includes the ability to use memories in any given situation also known as relational