TIL: HM, later revealed as Henry Molaison, was a famous patient who was studied extensively because of the memory loss loss that occurred as a result of radical treatment for grand mal seizures. The medial temporal lobes of both sides of his brain were resected in order to stop the extremely debilitating seizures. The loss of these regions of the brain resulted in a very interesting form of amnesia. HM lost the ability to form new long term declarative memories. He still had short term memory, procedural memory and the long term memories from before the surgery.
This all meant that if you had talked to him, he wouldn't have remembered the surgery or anything after it, but could form muscle memory from repeated trained tasks and could quickly solve puzzles that he had done repeatedly even though to him he had never seen them before. One of the other interesting quirks is that he always thought he was the age from the time of the surgery and would get very confused at seeing current pictures of himself.
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