The brain of the world’s likely most famous amnesiac, Henry Molaison, has been under intense scrutiny by millions of people since doctors in California began slicing it 2 December to better understand why the man, who died 2 December 2008, suffered from severe amnesia. Molaison spent much of his life, after surgery to stop epileptic seizures, unable to hold new memories more than 20-30 seconds. The UCSD Brain Observatory completed slicing the brain by the end of last week. Doctors will soon begin to analyze the more than 2,400 slices they obtained in a project designed to help medicine understand how memory works.

Links to other sites: CNN, NPR, University of California at San Diego Brain Observatory