When Henry Molaison, known to generations of psychology students as HM, the man who, following surgical damage to his hippocampus in an attempt to lessen his seizures, suffered profound and wide-ranging memory loss, died in 2008, he had arranged to donate his brain to science for post mortem examination. Why is it that, even with today's sophisticated imaging techniques, post mortem analyses

Question

remain scientifically valuable?

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Post mortem analyses are typically performed on individuals who have brain lesions as a result of injury, disease or surgery or who have abnormal brain structures as a result of congenital differences. Although some such lesions can be created in animals for the purposes of research, they cannot ethically be created in humans for the purpose of research. Neuroimaging techniques, while they are continuously advancing in their ability to provide both static and dynamic images of the brain, may miss subtle structural differences that are visual when stained brain slices are viewed under the microscope.