Amnesia In Memento

Memory is the mechanism through which one forms and alters their identity, and it is this inherent idea that is explored in Christopher Nolan’s film Memento, depicting a former insurance claims investigator, Lenny, on the hunt for the murderers of his wife while suffering from anterograde amnesia due to traumatic brain injury at the hands of the murderers. While Memento is not the first film to utilize amnesia as a plot device, it does deserve exceptional recognition for portraying the neurobiological effects of anterograde amnesia accurately. In particular, the film excels at portraying the utilization of an artificial memory system to showcase Lenny’s attempts at continuing his life and the portrayal of the impacts of anterograde amnesia …show more content…
In an experiment conducted by Zola-Morgan (1986), an amnesic patient named R.B. had damage to one specific region (CA1) of the hippocampus, therefore, supporting that damage limited to the hippocampus is enough to cause amnesia. This indicates that Nolan portrayed Lenny’s amnesia with a basis in creating lesions in the hippocampus and greater MTL regions, however, the severity of both Lenny’s retrograde and anterograde amnesia are contentious. A study done by Race and Verfaellie (2011) found that “the magnitude of semantic learning deficits in amnesia has been found to correspond to the amount of MTL damage.” This idea shows that Nolan inaccurately portrayed the extent of Lenny’s anterograde amnesia as his seems to be as severe as H.M.’s who had MTL region removal, whereas Lenny had a traumatic brain injury which would not have as greater MTL damage as surgical removal. Lenny is portrayed as being completely reliant on his artificial memory system and any attempts at learning new episodic or semantic memories are completely impaired to the extent that H.M. is described to be. Moreover, the severity of retrograde amnesia in Lenny’s case is underrepresented given the depicted severity of his anterograde amnesia. Race and Verfaellie further discuss how “some degree of retrograde memory loss is often observed” and that “memory is worse for more recent compared to more remote memories,” but both of these observations are not accounted for in Nolan’s Memento. Lenny, as shown through his recent memories of his wife, remembers episodic details about their life together prior to the injury, however, this is inherently inaccurate as this fairly recent memory should be more difficult to retrieve as opposed to older memories which are