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Hello, friends. Someone made a poor decision and is letting me train to be a doctor. Then a few more people made poor decisions and now you’ll have to suffer through me sharing stories, disorders, and facts that I find particularly interesting, strange, terrifying, or hilarious. I might do this daily, I might not. I’ve found medical school makes me a real bastard about honoring time commitments that aren’t medical school. Either way, should be fun while it lasts. So here goes:
Don’t trust chronic alcoholics’ memories. Not just because of the obvious (they’re drunk) but because they tend to worry more about getting wasted than eating food. In truly severe cases this can cause Wernicke-Korsakoff syndrome. It’s a vitamin deficiency (B1 if you’re interested) that causes neuronal death in the mamillary bodies, dorsomedial nucleus of the thalamus, and the hippocampal formation (mamillary bodies are two little bumps on the underside of your brain that, if you squint hard enough, look like boobs. Hence “mamillary bodies”). The rest of those structures don’t have fun nomenclature stories but they all sit around the brainstem/brain junction. As a very general rule, anything near that is even more vitally important than the rest of your brain.
Anyway, the weird effect of that neuronal destruction is an inability to form new memories. Turns out those particular regions are the location for consolidation of long-term declarative memory from short-term memory. These individuals may seem to be mentally normal but if you ask them about the past they’ll do what’s called confabulation and string unrelated memory fragments into a new synthetic memory which they’ll swear is true.
Dr Sponsered
I drink daily. Not all day mind you, but when 5 o’clock rolls around I usually have a drink in my hand. My question isn’t about me so much. I have several friends who tend to remember our evenings differently than I do. My question is: who should I believe?
You’re probably both wrong. Cheers.
Love,
Not a Dr.
I thought this was gonna be about auto repair. -1
+1
neuronal death in the mamillary bodies, dorsomedial nucleus of the thalamus, and the hippocampal formation
Um, hippos aren’t mammals, they’re reptiles. Marble-eating reptiles.
Fun fact, seahorses reside in the genus hippocampus. It’s greek…’hippos’ means horse and ‘kampos’ means sea monster. Way back in the day some anatomist decided the hippocampal formation looked like a sea horse and named it for that.
I’ll agree only to the extent that it looks more like a sea horse than the other parts of the brain (there’s an extended straight part and another region that, in MRIs at least, looks kind of like a sea horse’s coiled tail).
Another anatomist (I’m not sure it was an anatomist but we’ll go with that for now) mistakenly called it the hippopotamus formation and that name actually stuck around in academia for like 40-50 years before the confusion was cleared up.
Listen, as someone who has spent years drinking and studying the hippocampus, I can definitively say that tntdcmibg,8!tvjy& f645!tyj
The lesson, as always, is that if you think that you might have to pass a polygraph someday, start drinking. A lot.
Oh please. What would a Deadspin commenter know about dealing with drunks?