a newspaper article and then forget everything within seconds. He
would meet and have conversations with his doctors and other people
and have no recollection of the conversation or the people a few min-
utes later. This was the case even for people he met repeatedly over
many years. He forgot events in his life almost as fast as they occurred.The hippocampus, via the adjacent entorhinal cortex, is highly
interconnected with all other regions of the cerebral cortex—with
interconnectivity running in both directions. This elaborate neural
communication appears to be central to organizing, storing, and
consolidating memory, with the hippocampus serving as a hub of
distributed activation that somehow helps to form the networks
of cortical neural connections involved in representing memories
in the brain. (The elaborate interconnectivity is also likely to be the
reason that the medial temporal lobe is a frequent focus of seizures.
Anomalous neural activity here may efficiently spread into large
areas of the cortex.)(^)
There were, however, some things that H.M. could still learn and
remember. Careful investigation revealed that H.M. (as well as other
postsurgical amnesia patients with hippocampal lesions) could learn
certain things related to motor performance. When H.M. was given
a pencil and asked to trace a path through a maze and was given the
same maze day after day, he improved in his performance. He also
improved over a period of several days of repeated practice in his abil-
ity to trace outlines with a pencil while looking in a mirror. However,
when brought back to the identical testing situation for the tenth day
in arow, he claimed to never have seen the maze, or mirror, or design
before. He was unable to verbalize any memory about it, nor did he