He was kind of eternally trapped in the present tense.”Īlthough it might sound obvious now, before KC came along, neuroscientists hadn’t realized how closely tied, on a cognitive level, our future is to our past. He couldn’t project himself forward at all, and kind of realize that he would want to be doing something in a month or a year. “When he lost his past self,” says Kean of KC, “he lost all sense of what he was going to do over the next hour, or over the next day, or over the next year.

After losing his long-term memory, KC became one of the most famous patients in neuroscience. KC (“Kent Cochrane”), right, with his family. But KC taught us still more: That our ability to imagine the future is tied to our ability to use our memories to reexperience the past. You can lose one type of memory without losing the other. HM taught us that conscious memories of things like which street you grew up on (personal semantic information or facts about yourself) and what happened on your prom night (episodic memories for events in your past) are stored independently from other types of nonconscious memories, of things like how to ride a bike or play the guitar. KC’s case was similar to that of Henry Molaison, another famous amnesiac known as HM. That’s quite different from other amnesiacs, whose damage is either restricted to only one brain hemisphere, or includes large portions of regions outside of the hippocampus. Both of his hippocampi, the parts of the brain that allow us to form new long-term memories for facts and events in our lives, were lost. But in 1981, a motorcycle accident left him without two critical brain structures. The man who could not imagine the future: Kent Cochrane (KC), pictured below, was a ’70s wild child, playing in a rock band, getting into bar fights, and zooming around Toronto on his motorcycle. Here are five patients, from Kean’s book, whose stories transformed neuroscience:ġ. “But then I looked into it, and I realized that, not only is it true, it actually reveals some important things about how the brain works.” “As I was reading these I said, ‘That’s baloney! There’s no way that can possibly be true,'” Kean remembers, referring to one particularly surprising case in which a woman’s brain injury left her unable to recognize and distinguish between different kinds of animals. Kean recounts some of their unforgettable stories on the latest episode of the Inquiring Minds podcast. In his new book, The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons, Sam Kean tells the story of a handful of patients whose unique brains-rendered that way by surgical procedures, rare diseases, and unfortunate, freak accidents-taught us much more than any set of colorful scans.

But there’s another approach to understanding how our minds work.

The tale of two dueling neurosurgeons