ABSTRACT

Kent Cochrane, known in the scientific literature by the initials KC, has a special status in the archives of memory research. He had been investigated extensively for nearly 30 years since a motorcycle accident left him with widespread brain damage that included large bilateral hippocampal lesions, resulting in a sharp dissociation between intact semantic memory and impaired episodic memory. Carefree and boisterous in his late adolescence and early adulthood, he was described by family and friends as the ringleader in mischief. KC was like HM and other amnesic cases reported in the literature in that he displayed anterograde amnesia for material encountered post-injury despite relatively preserved intelligence, language, and reasoning ability. The left-sided posterior hypointensity on the MR images reflected a lesion that appeared to be an occipital-temporal infarction, likely resulting from posterior cerebral artery compression secondary to the increased intracranial pressure caused by the head trauma.