The grades for each discussion are posted as an added message at the end of the last question you were marked on "Are the conclusions important?" Anyone who did not post before Sunday midnight will be docked .5 from the mark given to the group. Anyone who did not contribute to the discussion will be given "0".


I thought the following response to the question "Is the research important?" was very good. This person mapped the knowledge they have about other brain and memory studies to illustrate why this research has value.


This research is important. Not only does it provide better understanding for what DID patients go through, but this may help us understand memory in the bigger picture. Many parts of the brain have been mapped and labelled by a specific function. Many more functions have not been given a part of the brain that is dedicated to that function. One of these functions is memory. At first, it was thought that the entire brain stores memory. This theory was sort of put to rest the
case of H.M. came out. HM was a severe epileptic, and had the medial portions of his temporal lobes removed. This treated the epilepsy, but created a very unique memory deficit. He could not form new memories. This implicated the hippocampus in the forming of memories. Another case, RB, further implicated this hypothesis. Unfortunately, these cases have many cases that go against them. We must also look at the circumstances of the brain in these cases. In HM, he had an existing brain disorder. It's hard to tell whether the epilepsy had anything to do with the memory loss or not. RB had memory loss because of a lack of blood to the brain (ischemia), which is a pretty devastating injury. This could have created more damage than in the hippocampus. The point to this is that we know very little about memory and maybe experiments like this will help us tie everything together once further research has been done.