50 First Dates Psychology

50 First Dates, released in 2004, is an American romantic comedy film that tells the story of Henry, who meets and forms a relationship with an amnesiac by the name of Lucy. Lucy’s short term memory is impaired as a result of a car crash, and consequently she forgets everything about her life post-crash. This means that every day she has no recollection of meeting Henry and is unknowingly repeating the same actions, such as eating breakfast at the Hukilau Cafe and watching the same football match, which the help of her father and brother. As the film progresses, Henry goes to extraordinary lengths to win over Lucy as the seriousness of her condition is revealed.

The psychological concept of memory refers to the process in which information …show more content…
Despite this, long term memory from before the amnesia-causing event remains the same. Anterograde amnesia comes from a failure in memory encoding and storage, with new information unable to enter the long term memory. Lucy’s short term memory has been affected, although new procedural memories (the learnings of skills and habits) can be laid down. In the early 1900s, Swiss psychologist Edouard Claparede conducted research confirming this, making it clear that anterograde amnesiacs are able to learn new tasks involving the procedural memory. The main part of the brain that is involved with anterograde amnesia is the hippocampus. This is a small organ located in the brain’s medial temporal lobe which deals with the formation of long term memories - Lucy’s memory loss is strongly related to the damage of her hippocampus, which explains her incapacity to create any new information to be stored in her long term memory. Neurosurgeons William Scoville and Brenda Miller were the first to describe a link between the hippocampus and long term memory after studying an epileptic individual who developed severe amnesia, causing damage to their short-term and namely episodic