《New York Times Magazine》8月3日发表的《The Brain That Couldn’t Remember》，讲述了神经科学史上最有名的病人之一、开启记忆科学革命的“H.M.”——Henry Molaison的故事。

文章节选自Luke Dittrich所著《Patient H.M.: A Story of Memory, Madness and Family Secrets》，该书即将由兰登书屋出版。

由于文章过长且编译团队的成员们最近处于死线缠身的状态，因此本文采取协作译文形式，想参与翻译的朋友可访问译言协作链接：http://co.yeeyan.org/view/886403，直接在该链接翻译即可。

所有参与译者均会得到署名，翻译问题可直接在译言协作页面讨论。其他问题可发邮件至neureality@yeah.net。

由神经现实团队翻译的有关另一位著名病人的故事可戳：《菲尼斯·盖奇：神经科学史上最有名的病人》。

原文节选：

“Can you tell me who the president of the United States is at the moment?”

A man and a woman sat in an office in the Clinical Research Center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It was 1986, and the man, Henry Molaison, was about to turn 60. He was wearing sweatpants and a checkered shirt and had thick glasses and thick hair. He pondered the question for a moment.

“No,” he said. “I can’t.”

The woman, Jenni Ogden, was a visiting postdoctoral research fellow from the University of Auckland, in New Zealand. One of the greatest thrills of her time at M.I.T. was the chance to have sit-down sessions with Henry. In her field — neuropsychology — he was a legendary figure, something between a rock star and a saint.

“Who’s the last president you remember?”

“I don’t. ... ” He paused for a second, mulling over the question. He had a soft, tentative voice, a warm New England accent.

“Ike,” he said finally.

Dwight D. Eisenhower’s inauguration took place in 1953. Our world had spun around the sun more than 30 times since, though Henry’s world had stayed still, frozen in orbit. This is because 1953 was the year he received an experimental operation, one that destroyed most of several deep-­seated structures in his brain, including his hippocampus, his amygdala and his entorhinal cortex. The operation, performed on both sides of his brain and intended to treat Henry’s epilepsy, rendered him profoundly amnesiac, unable to hold on to the present moment for more than 30 seconds or so. That outcome, devastating to Henry, was a boon to science: By 1986, Patient H.M. — as he was called in countless journal articles and textbooks — had become arguably the most important human research subject of all time, revolutionizing our understanding of how memory works.

Of course, Henry didn’t know that. No matter how many times the scientists told him he was famous, he’d always forget. (It was an odd sort of fame: The scientists kept even his first name a closely guarded secret from the outside world and didn’t reveal it until after his death, when it was unveiled in a front-page obituary in this newspaper.) Similarly, Henry didn’t know why he was in a wheelchair that day, in the office at M.I.T., because he didn’t remember badly spraining his ankle a few weeks before.

He had big ears, big hands and, often, a big smile. Earlier, Ogden asked if he could place her accent, and he guessed that she was British, then Canadian, then Swedish. She gave him a short list to choose from, and eventually he made his way to New Zealand. She then asked if he could tell her anything about New Zealand. He impressed her by noting, correctly, that it was a country of two islands. In his spare time, Henry liked doing crossword puzzles, and his knowledge of geography was decent. This was one of the things about Henry that fascinated scientists: His amnesia often appeared, as they termed it, pure. There was an abyss in his brain that all the passing events of his life tumbled into, but on the surface he could seem almost normal.

“Now,” Ogden continued, “if I tell you that the president now used to be a film star, does that help? Not a very good film star, but he used to be one a long time ago. I think he used to be a film star in westerns. And he’s the president of the United States. Rea ... ?”

The syllable tripped a circuit in Henry.

“Reagan,” he said.

“Reagan! Very good. Do you remember he used to be a film star?”

“Well, yes.”

They spoke for a while about other film stars he remembered. Gary Cooper. Myrna Loy. Jimmy Stewart.

“What about Frank Sinatra?” Ogden asked Henry.

He considered the question.

“Well,” he said, “he did a lot of singing, and he was in films and on the stage and radio and records.”

“Do you think he’s still alive, Frank Sinatra?”

Henry paused.

“There I don’t know.”

The scientists posed these sorts of questions to him, questions about who was living and who was not, relentlessly. They wanted to see if even the most drastic events — and nothing in life is more drastic than death — had failed to stick. At one point, Henry responded to some other questions of Ogden’s by telling her that he thought he lived at home with his mother in East Hartford, but he wasn’t sure about his father, because he had a feeling that maybe his father had died. In fact, Henry lived in a nursing home when he wasn’t living on-site at the M.I.T. Clinical Research Center, and both his parents were long deceased. Henry would learn of someone’s death and grieve in his own quiet way, but if he wasn’t constantly reminded of his loss, that person would soon slowly come back to life in his mind. This cycle of death and resurrection may have been painful. For a while, Henry made a habit of carrying around a little scrap of paper reminding him that his father was dead.

Now Ogden asked about someone who was still living, someone who was neither a celebrity nor a relative, but someone who loomed large to Henry.

“Who or what,” she asked, “is Sue Corkin?”

“Well. She was a ... like a senator.”

“A senator?”

“Yeah.”

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