The Man Who Learned Without Knowing

This story depends on a puzzle. You can see it on the left. To solve it, touch the copper dot and drag it along the road between the two stars without touching either.

Of course, there is a catch. The puzzle is reflected in a mirror. You'll find you can move the dot up and down as you normally would, but left and right are reversed, and that makes all the difference.

Give it a try. Everyone finds it frustrating, but if you try a few times, you'll begin to see how you could learn to solve it.

If you've tried it a few times, you probably felt very clumsy. Most people do. I have a feeling this is a little bit of what babies feel when they are first learning to use their hands.

Still, babies do learn to use their hands, and just about anyone can learn to solve this puzzle.

If you'd like to play with the puzzle some more, click I want to Remember this on the left, and we'll put it in your practice list.

Now that you understand the puzzle, I can start the story.

Henry

In 1953, a young man in Connecticut named Henry Molaison had an operation on his brain. He was twenty-seven. He'd had seizures since he was a boy — storms of electricity in the brain that knock you down — and they'd gotten so bad he couldn't hold a job. The neurosurgeon, William Scoville, thought the storms started in a part of the brain called the hippocampus, and he took it out. Both sides. Tap the brain on the left and I'll show you what he took.

The seizures got better. And Henry stopped being able to remember anything new.

Not everything. He remembered his childhood. He knew his name, his parents, the streets of Hartford. He could talk with you, joke with you, do a crossword. But if you left the room and came back ten minutes later, he'd greet you as a stranger. He met the same doctors every week for fifty years and never once recognized them. He read the same magazines over and over. Every morning, the news was news.

The hippocampus, it turned out, is where the brain writes down what happened. Say it "hippo-CAMP-us"; it's named after a seahorse, because it's curled like one. You have two, one on each side, deep in the middle of the head, about level with your ears. Henry's were gone, so nothing new got written down. The pen was missing.

Brenda and the star

A neuropsychologist named Brenda Milner came down from Montreal to study Henry. She came for years. He never remembered her.

In 1962 she gave him the star. The same one you just tried: two outlines, a mirror, a pencil, trace the road. He bumped the edges about thirty times. She had him do it ten times that day, ten the next day, ten the day after.

Each morning he said he'd never seen it before. Each morning he was right, as far as he knew; the hippocampus writes down what happened, and his couldn't.

And each morning he was better at it. By the third day he went round the star almost clean, like someone who'd practiced for weeks, which he had. Then he looked at what he'd done and said something Milner never forgot:

"Huh. This is strange. I thought that would be difficult, but it seems as though I've done it quite well."

He had learned the mirror. He had no memory of learning it. Both of those were true at once.

Two memories

So there are two of them. Two different kinds of remembering, kept in different places, and you can lose one and keep the other.

One is what happened. Where you were yesterday, who said what, this story. That one runs through the hippocampus, and it's the one you can feel: you know when you remember something, and you know when you don't.

The other is getting better at things. Riding a bicycle, tying a knot, tracing a star in a mirror, playing a tune. That one lives somewhere else — mostly in a knot of structures under the cortex called the basal ganglia, and in the cerebellum at the back, the wrinkled thing that keeps your movements smooth. Henry kept all of it. And here's the part that matters to you: you can't feel this one working. There's no "aha." There's no moment you notice it. There's just, one day, your hand knowing.

You can watch the difference. On the left, run the star through your brain, and then through Henry's.

Henry had one advantage over you, and it's worth knowing about. He didn't remember being frustrated. Every morning the star puzzle was new. Every morning he sat down to it the way you'd sit down to a game you'd never played or a puzzle you'd never seen before. He was curious. The puzzle was new and might be fun.

Think what that would feel like. If it was always the first time you saw the puzzle, you couldn't remember being bored or discouraged, because as far as you were concerned, you hadn't even started.

You'd have what Zen masters call "beginner's mind."

Most of us have to work to develop beginner's mind. When we come back to the star, we remember the last time we tried and how it felt. That memory whispers, this is hard. If that whisper gets loud enough, we may give up.

But Henry taught us something remarkable about that whisper. It can be wrong. We know that because Henry got better at the star puzzle. His brain learned how to do it even though Henry couldn't remember practicing it.

That means learning can happen without feeling like learning.

When you learn to draw, dance, play the piano, throw a curve ball, or ride a unicycle, several different systems in your brain are changing. Some of those changes happen quietly. You don't necessarily feel them happening, and your memory of yesterday's practice isn't a reliable measurement of them.

So the part of you that says I'm not getting any better doesn't necessarily know whether you're getting better.

There's an easy way to find out if you are learning anything. Practice for a few minutes every day, save the results and, after a week, compare what you can do now with what you could do then.

Don't ask your frustration whether you are learning. Ask the evidence.

People who knew Henry were struck by how positive and cheerfully persistent he was. In a way, he had no choice. Yesterday's failures couldn't tell him to stop trying today. He couldn't remember them.

Henry paid a terrible price for that. But he also gave us an immense gift. He showed us that you can be learning even when you don't know you're learning.

Most of us can remember yesterday. Henry couldn't. He taught us that, if we can remember yesterday without letting yesterday decide what we can learn today... if we can do that, we can master anything.