American Innovations - Man with No Memory | The Accident | S55-E1

Man with No Memory | The Accident | S55-E1

11/11/21 • 41 min

2 Listeners

Even as recently as the early 1950s, we didn’t understand that there were different types of memory, or how the brain processed and stored memories. Then, in 1953, a radical surgery by a reckless doctor gave us tremendous insights into how human memory works. Those scientific gains came at a terrible cost, however. The surgery left the patient, Henry Molaison, a profound amnesiac -- completely incapable of forming new memories. This is his story.

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During the 1-900 number craze of the Nineties, one company provided the vast majority of phone sex. American Telnet was an empire founded by the man who called himself “The Telephone Pimp.” He ran the company “like General Motors” and got filthy rich doing it. But for the (mostly) women who answered the calls and delivered fantasies 24-7, it was a different story. The powerful stigma against sex work was always lurking just beneath the surface, until it threatened to tear apart the whole company. Hosted by Tina Horn (Why Are People Into That?), OPERATOR is an eight-part series about big ambitions, Shakespearean-level corporate backstabbing, men and women at the cutting edge of a technological revolution...and on the front lines of a sexual one.

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Man with No Memory | The Permanent Now | 2

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Without a functioning memory, Henry Molaison struggles to cope with everyday life. He loses his job, and becomes totally dependent on his overwhelmed parents. Meanwhile, neuroscientist Brenda Milner realizes that Henry’s tragic case can solve some profound mysteries about how memory works in our brains—and might even reveal whole new aspects of memory that previously went undetected.

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