This is seriously one of the best books I’ve ever read! Every psychologist, psychology graduate and anyone who is interested in psychology should really read this, you won’t regret it!

I picked up this book less than two weeks ago from the National Library.

If you have done psychology undergraduate, do you remember Patient H. M.? To be honest, I barely remember him, until I was teaching psychology undergraduate and what I learnt about him are slowly coming back again.

To those who have not heard of him, he suffered from severe epilepsy after being hit by a bike during his teenage years, and since then he was literally living in episodes and episodes of epilepsy. Once an intelligent boy, he could barely attend college or hold any job due to the “breaks” that his brain was taking so frequently. Until one day in August 1953, the grandfather of the author Luke Dittrich opened his brain and sucked out his amygdala, hippocampus and some other parts in both hemispheres. After that surgery, patient H.M. can no longer form any new memory. He literally lived in the present moment all the time, every person is new, every task at hand is new, everything has to be told and retold, learnt and relearnt… (though experiment showed that he could still form some implicit memory, or procedural memory!!) Obviously, he became the most researched subject in understanding human’s brain, memory and neurology in the history.

When I was still in the Uni, he was known as patient H.M., his names and identity were protected just so people would not be able to find him, but now I know he is Henry Gustave Molaison. He past away in 2008 (but for Henry, his memory ended on that day in 1953).

Luke is such a brilliant writer, he linked the told and untold stories about patient H.M., with shocking history about how people used to “treat” people with mental illness, used to open up another human being’s brain and take out some parts, with his family secrets and tales. He also spent at least 6 years digging deeper into all the related people and places. I literally couldn’t stop myself flipping the page… If you have learnt some psychology, you would encounter some other familiar figures (e.g. Phineas Gage, Monsieur Tan) and how some popular concepts about brain and mind were discovered etc too.