Essay Examples on North shore international academy

William Scoville used a hand crank and a cheap drill Saw

On September 1 1953 William Scoville used a hand crank and a cheap drill saw to bore into a young man’s skull cutting off vital pieces of his brain and sucking them through a metal tube This wasn't a horror movie scene As a boy Henry had cracked his skull in an accident and soon began having seizures After enduring years of frequent episodes of epilepsy the desperate Henry had turned to Dr Scoville who decided to remove the young man s hippocampus whose function was still unknown The operation had succeeded Henry s seizures virtually disappeared but there was one problem Henry couldn t form new memories anymore He could no longer tell the coherent story of himself the story that told the world a great deal It was thanks to him that we now know that the seahorse shaped hippocampus as well as the structures alongside it are critical to the process of memory formation But how are our memories processed In the late 1960s American psychologists Richard Attkinson and Richard Shiffrin figured out enough about the process of memory formation to break it down into three stages 1st it s encoded into the brain then it's stored for future use then it's eventually retrieved Sounds simple but by now you figured out that just because you take a lot of stuff about your mind for granted doesn't mean that it's not complicated 



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