(ELOG 5 for CS3790: Cognitive Science)
Memento is an interesting movie. I mean, yeah, it’s got the whole doing the entire story backwards thing. But it’s also got a character with anterograde amnesia [wikipedia]. Anterograde amnesia is something I first encountered while watching Memento. Whenever you hear about amnesia in movies, it always seems to be retrograde amnesia – the kind that always happens in soap operas – so I’d never really heard about anterograde amnesia. Apparently it’s more common though.
Anterograde amnesia largely occurs in one of two ways: drug-induced or trauma-induced. Drug induced amnesia can be overcome with time, but trauma-induced damage is typically permanent. Either way, the amnesia is caused by damage to the memory systems of the brain. While we are still unclear on how memory works in the brain, we do know the areas generally responsible for memory. The typical suspect in cases of anterograde amnesia is damage to the medial temporal lobe (MTL). The medial temporal lobe includes the hippocampus.
Memento features a character who is bashed over the head, causing damage to this area of his brain and destroying his ability to form new memories. The extreme extent to which he has this trouble may seem somewhat far-fetched, but if you’ve ever seen anything about Clive Wearing [youtube] then you can consider the main character of Memento as practically normal by comparison. The debilitating effect anterograde amnesia can have on a person is best exemplified in the movie when the main character is trying to remember a person as an enemy and finds himself struggling to find a pen to write this important fact down while he tries to keep the thought in short-term memory using rehearsal.
Anterograde amnesia often only involves what is know as declarative memory – memories of facts, such as what happened when. Often time the amnesiac retains the ability to form new habits or even simple skills and this is known as non-declarative memory. Also, in many cases, the person completely retains memories from before the cause of their illnesses. The contrast between these types of memory and how they are affected by anterograde amnesia definitely shows that the MTL is not the only place memory is dealt with in the brain. We see the main character in the movie using these differences to his advantage by using procedural habits to deal with his lack of memory.
Altogether, Memento is as intriguing a movie as anterograde amnesia is a condition. It’s definitely worth watching, even (or especially) if it was edited together to play out the story backwards. (Each colored scene in the movie happens chronologically before the scenes shown after it, and the black and white shots spliced in happen before all of the color events.) In fact, this style of story telling makes perfect sense from the point of view of the main character, whose life is not linear, but just a bunch of independent scenes.
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