Misstatements About Lonni Sue Johnson Are Like Misstatements About Henry Molaison

 A recent article in Scientific American is an article entitled "You Don't Remember Being a Baby, But Your Brain Was Making Memories."  The article provides no real evidence that brains create memories, and  its attempts to support such a claim are mostly references to junk science studies. 

The author is a neuroscientist named Nick Turk-Browne who fills up his article with unfounded claims and bad reasoning. First he suggests the reason people cannot remember their first five years is that the hippocampus is not active during those years. That makes no sense. The hippocampus is active during the first five years of life. 

Turk-Browne then repeats the very frequently repeated false claim that patient H.M. (Henry Molaison) suffered hippocampus damage in adulthood that made him unable to form new memories, saying that Henry Molaison was "unable to store memories,"  The claim is not true. 

Henry Molaison (patient H.M.)  was able to remember very many things from his life before his hippocampus damage. A 14-year follow-up study of patient H.M. (whose memory problems started in 1953) actually tells us that H.M. was able to form some new memories. The study says this on page 217:

"In February 1968, when shown the head on a Kennedy half-dollar, he said, correctly, that the person portrayed on the coin was President Kennedy. When asked him whether President Kennedy was dead or alive, and he answered, without hesitation, that Kennedy had been assassinated...In a similar way, he recalled various other public events, such as the death of Pope John (soon after the event), and recognized the name of one of the astronauts, but his performance in these respects was quite variable."

Another paper ("Evidence for Semantic Learning in Profound Amnesia: An Investigation With Patient H.M.") tells us this about patient H.M., clearly providing evidence that patient HM could form many new memories:

"We used cued recall and forced-choice recognition tasks to investigate whether the patient H.M. had acquired knowledge of people who became famous after the onset of his amnesia. Results revealed that, with first names provided as cues, he was able to recall the corresponding famous last name for 12 of 35 postoperatively famous personalities. This number nearly doubled when semantic cues were added, suggesting that his knowledge of the names was not limited to perceptual information, but was incorporated in a semantic network capable of supporting explicit recall. In forced-choice recognition, H.M. discriminated 87% of postmorbid famous names from foils. Critically, he was able to provide uniquely identifying semantic facts for one-third of these recognized names, describing John Glenn, for example, as 'the first rocketeer' and Lee Harvey Oswald as a man who 'assassinated the president.' Although H.M.’s semantic learning was clearly impaired, the results provide robust, unambiguous evidence that some new semantic learning can be supported by structures beyond the hippocampus proper."

Turk-Browne also makes the claim that because of a bad case of a  hippocampus damage, Lonni Sue Johnson was "unable to store memories."  That claim is also untrue.  Lonni Sue Johnson had very bad brain damage after a case of viral encephalitis. She was discussed at length in a book "The Eternal Now" by Michael D. Lemonick. But on page 13 of the preface of the book, we read a different claim. Instead of someone claiming that Lonni Sue Johnson could not form any new memories, we merely read that "she could no longer form new memories that she'd be able to rely on in the future, except in the most rudimentary way." This is an admission that Loni Sue Johnson could form new memories. 

We can have some skepticism about such a claim, because it is by an author trying to present a compilation of interesting cases of loss of memory, and such a person may be motivated to exaggerate memory loss, to make the story more interesting and the book more marketable. 

Lemonick's makes generalizations that the memory of Lonni Sue Johnson that we should take with some skepticism, because they are not established by formal tests. What seems to often be happening is that Lemonick is making generalizations based on limited anecdotal evidence, generalizations that may be hasty generalizations that would be disproven by extended formal testing.  

Lemonick tells us that Lonnie Sue Johnson had a big hole in the center of her head. That may have affected her recognition memory and her visual acuity.  So when we later read about Lonnie failing to recognize someone she had previously met, that is no proof of an inability to form new memories. It may be mere evidence of a visual problem or a recognition problem. 

So, for example, when Lemonick tells us on page 9 that "if she sees someone new, then sees them again a day later (or even five minutes later, as I discovered for myself), she'll have no idea that she ever saw them before," we do not actually know that this is some inability to form new memories.  It could be some mere difficulty in visual recognition or visual perception. Or, it could be that Lemonick is wrongly making sweeping generalizations based on very little data. If someone does not recognize you after meeting you a few minutes before, that is nowhere close to sufficient evidence that the person is unable to form new memories. 

The claim that Lemonick makes on page 9 that Lonni had lost memory of some of her family members is another claim that we should treat with suspicion. It may be a claim based mainly on a failure of visual recognition. Lemonick makes statements such as "she didn't know Kay, or her daughter Maya," referring to someone who was not Lonni's daughter. But what justification does Lemonick have for such claims?  How does he presume to know what a brain-damaged person did or did not know or remember when seeing some friend or her daughter?  Was the claim based merely on a failure of Lonni to recite their names after seeing them? We don't know. 

What we need here is some systematic procedure to test such a claim that a memory of someone's daughter had been lost. Such a procedure would include both a test of visual recognition, and a transcript of a long interview.  The interview might ask questions such as "Do you remember Kay?" and "Have you ever heard the voice that will speak next?" and "Do you recognize the face you will see next?" and so forth.  But we don't get details of any such a procedure.  We mainly get Lemonick kind of presuming what Lonni did or did not remember, based on thin evidence. 

On the next page (page 10) it becomes clear that the heavily brain-damaged Lonni did not lose all her memories of the past. We read that "she knows Maggi and Aline, but when you show her photographs of her aunts and uncles, she recognizes only some of them." We read that "she does know that she once had two airplanes." When Lemonick claims that Lonni does not remember her wedding day or her divorce, we should treat such claims with great skepticism, because they are not backed up by any quotes that Lemonick gives. And if you have a  quote from someone saying she does not remember some event, that does not well prove that the person has no memory of such an event. Ask the right questions at different times, and the same person may give you some details of the event. For example, ask a person about Napoleon, and she may say, "I don't remember anything about Napoleon." But then ask about Napoleon's final battle, and you may get an answer of "Waterloo." I can hardly overemphasize the importance of this point. Single-statement self-reports by a person about what he remembers on a topic may be very unreliable. And such self-reports coming from brain-damaged persons may be particularly unreliable. 

Often when a person says that he does not remember anything about some topic, it's just a way of indicating that the person does not want to be bothered with trying to recall what he remembers about that topic. Ask an adult what he remembers about the war of 1812, and there's a good chance he may say something like, "I don't remember anything about that." But ask the same person whether he remembers any fire occurring during that war, and there's a good chance the person may give an answer such as, "Yes, I remember the British burnt the White House," referring to an event of that war.  It is easy to imagine possible reasons why someone who got divorced might make some statement sounding like she does not remember her wedding or her divorce (for example, the person might be making an excuse to avoid recalling possibly painful memories of an unsuccessful marriage). 

Later on the same page when Lemonick claims that Lonni had lost "just about every other memory she'd accumulated in fifty-seven years of life," we should doubt very much that Lemonick is speaking correctly. What is the justification for such a claim? Was some formal standard test done to justify such a claim? Or is Lemonick simply making guesses about what Lonni remembers?

I made a search on Google Scholar for scientific papers referring to Lonni Sue Johnson. I was unable to find a single scientific paper that mentioned her using that name. I did find an article by a science writer, one claiming that Lonni "could not form new memories." That does not match the previously quoted statement by Lemonick suggesting that Lonni could form "rudimentary" new memories. The article presents no data supporting this claim that Lonni Sue Johnson could not form new memories. The article refers to "published studies of her memory after the viral attack."  We have some citations at the end of the paper. Only one of the papers cited refers to Lonni Sue Johnson, using the initials L. S. J.  The paper is behind a paywall, but the abstract of the paper does not mention any inability of this L. S. J. to form new memories. 

The claim in the article above does not match what we are told in a 2016 Johns Hopkins article, which merely says that Lonni Sue Johnson had a "severely restricted ability to learn new facts," which is different from being unable to learn new facts. 

The video here shows a picture of Lonni Sue's brain, showing severe damage, with the black areas being places hollowed out by the virus:

We hear a narrator (whose claims should be taken with skepticism) claiming that Lonni Sue lost almost all of her memories. But around the 2:50 mark we hear Lonni Sue successfully and very rapidly reciting all of the letters in the alphabet in correct order, performance seemingly incompatible with the narrator's claim. Around the 3:00 mark the narrator says Lonni Sue has "a little ability to create new memories," contrary to Turk-Browne's claim that she could not form new memories.  At the 3:28 mark we see Lonni Sue playing what looks like a violin very well (the instrument seems to be a viola). Around the 5:36 mark we see very good drawings Lonni Sue made after her brain damage. 

Around the 5:56 mark we hear Lonni Sue speaking like a normal person, saying art "is a language, a visual language, that you can reach everyone of every nationality," and that "writing is fun too." Around the 8:30 mark we hear Lonni Sue sing-speaking, singing in an apparently improvised melody. 

Another video on Lonni Sue has the phony title "The Woman Who Lost All Her Memories," a title not matching the facts of the case described above. The video provides no evidence to support the claim that Lonni Sue could not form new memories. 

In this case we are lacking any systematic evidence for the claim that Lonni Sue Johnson could not form new memories. For such a claim to be made with credibility, we would need something like a transcript of a long interview, or the results of hours of systematic testing. A failure of someone to recognize a person they had met before is not good evidence of an inability to form new memories.  Such a failure could be due to visual processing defects and visual recognition problems that are mainly related to vision rather than memory. 

Remembering that old slogan "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence," we can translate the slogan to mean "you should have very strong evidence before making a claim of the extraordinary."  The claim that Hubert Pearce had extrasensory perception is an extraordinary claim, but it is backed up very well by many hundreds of hours of very careful tests that Professor Joseph Rhine did with Hubert Pearce (tests described here).  The claim that Alexis Didier had powers of clairvoyance is an extraordinary claim, but it is supported by endless successful tests performed of Alexis Didier, some of which are described here. No one should be making a claim that Lonni Sue Johnson could not form new memories unless they have very strong evidence to back up such a claim, such as a long, detailed scientific paper giving the results of very careful tests of her. Such evidence seems nowhere to be found. 

Lack of motivation by someone asked a question is usually a more plausible explanation for a lack of an answer than some explanation of an inability to learn. Claims of an inability to learn would be far more convincing if they were backed up by careful tests repeated many times, in which subjects were strongly motivated to perform highly.  You can imagine all kinds of ways to motivate better performance, such as offering 300 dollars for each item recalled.

He may be wrongly reported as having antegrade amnesia

In my next post in a few days I will discuss other misstatements in the Scientific American article, in which we hear a discussion of   neuroscience experiments done on infants, experiments I will criticize as being goofy and reckless.  We should always remember that when it comes to cases of memory difficulties, the world of neuroscience literature is a "give them an inch, and they'll take a mile" affair. We should remember that there is a very strong incentive for people to make cases of memory difficulties sound worse than they are, because such claims may increase citation counts and book sales and video viewership, in a way that leads to greater profit or success for someone engaging in such exaggerations, and because such claims may be made by those very eager to conjure up claims that may seem to support "brains store memories" dogmas.