Always worth a read

I awoke this morning to the disappointing but expected news that the Prime Minister of Canada had suspended parliament to avoid a confidence vote that would have ended his reign and replaced his government with a coalition of opposition parties. You see we have a minority Conservative government that desperately wants to be a majority. Earlier in the fall, after only two years in power, they called a quickie election (only 5 weeks of campaigning) in a cynical attempt to win a majority of the seats in parliament, but we got pretty much the same result as before, at great taxpayer expense.

Those of you who are students of Psychology or Neuroscience are surely aware of H.M., a patient known only by those initials, who incurred significant memory impairment as the result of an experimental brain surgery performed in 1953. H.M., now revealed as Henry G. Molaison, passed away this week at the age of 83, leaving behind his enormous, if unplanned, contribution to the field of brain research and neuropsychology.