There are several conditions of memory losses. In the movie Memento, viewers can watch and experience a rare state of memory loss. In the movie, the leading actor is Leonard who is an insurance claims investigator. He exposes a man by the name Sammy Jankins who fraudulently claims to suffer from anterograde amnesia. One-night two men break into his house rape and murder his wife. He kills one of them but suffers a blow from the other, which leaves him with brain damage and suffers a condition known as anterograde amnesia. This prevents him from holding memories in his brain any longer than a short duration of time and because of this he cannot maintain relationships, learns new things, and has no perception of time. Perception is the process of acquiring and gathering information from the environment through one’s senses and sensibly organizing that information. Because of his inability to remember any new memories, he uses metal cues and tattoos on his body to retrace his steps.
John Gamel alias teddy, which is his undercover name, is a cop who is assigned to Leonard’s case. The police do not believe that there was a second man in the break-in, but Teddy does. He helps Leonard kill the man by the name John G. After Leonard avenges his wife he forgets it because of his condition and cannot carry on with his life as he still feels the need for revenge and teddy who is also a dirty cop uses this to his advantage. He uses Leonard to take out many people by giving him false clues that the victims are Johny G who killed his wife. One such victim is a drug dealer by the name Jimmy. On the ultimate action, while Leonard is about to kill Jimmy, he realizes that he was not Johny G and he turns his focus to Teddy. Leonard realizes that he had killed Johny G a year ago and Teddy had been using him to carry out his dirty work. From the confrontation between the two, Leonard figures in his mind that Teddy is also Johny G and ends up shooting Teddy (Kauttonen etal, 2018).
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From the movie, it displays memory effects of Anterograde amnesia. Leonard is unable to create any new memories after the incident, which caused him to suffer the condition. He kills the person who murdered his wife, but he forgets the act after a short time, is faced with the same grief as before, and still seeks to avenge his wife’s death. People suffering from this condition can retain procedural memory, which is the learning of skills and habits. From the movie, Leonard is still able to remember how to pick up a phone, but he cannot remember conversations with people like Teddy. Victims of the condition also retain semantic memory; Leonard is still able to communicate because he has not forgotten his language. Leonard also uses tattoos on his body and photos to relate to issues.
Studies depict that anterograde amnesia is a disorder, which comes because of damage to the parts of the brain such as the hippocampus, and the areas connected to it in the medial temporal lobes. The damage can be caused by various things ranging from; strokes, brain aneurysms, encephalitis, epilepsy, Alzheimer’s disease, hypoxia and many more complications that that may have a direct damaging effect on this part of the brain. Historically, actual research done on people with the disorder, there is a well-documented case of a patient known as HM in the late 1950’s (Pepe & Bollen, 2008) . He suffered from severe epileptic seizures, which originated from the medial temporal lobes of the brain. Doctors opted to remove the parts of the medial temporal lobes to stop the seizures. This process resulted in HM losing nearly two-thirds of his hippocampus, which is critical in forming new memories.
From the movie, Leonard is not able to keep short memories as he cannot remember his conversations with Teddy, and also him killing Johny G; similarly, HM always introduced himself to his psychologist Brenda Milner despite working closely with her for several decades. Studies further show that victims suffering from this condition seldom remember the incident that put them in that situation. However, in the movie, Leonard can remember the incident that put him in this condition. People suffering from the condition are not necessarily aware of their state. In a real story of Clive wearing, a British conductor, he constantly wrote and even had a journal. However, he never acknowledges writing any of his other entries despite them being in his handwriting. In contrast, in the movie memento, it depicts Leonard with the ability to successfully use his notes, photos, and tattoos to navigate through issues.
The movie is successful in showing that people with anterograde amnesia cannot form new memories. Further to this, it also shows that they are still capable of learning some new skills. Leonard states that the insurance company he worked for was able to dismiss Sammy’s insurance claim because test measuring his ability to make unconscious associations indicated that his condition was psychological and not physical. The test in the movie had Sammy to touch electrified shapes in an attempt to prove he could learn through association: this was an unethical way of testing a patient with impaired memory. Patients with severe anterograde amnesia can experience non-verbal learning on simple tasks, but although they can improve on this, the performance of patients is still abnormal (Galotti, 2017) .
By large, the movie Memento depicts a nearly perfect example of a person suffering from anterograde amnesia. However, some few inaccuracies can be noted. For example, Leonard can locate his car wherever he is which is nearly impossible for a person suffering from this disorder. Secondly, Leonard seems to understand more about his condition than an average patient of the condition would. The movie also depicts Sammy not reacting to the electric test. Things like shock do not necessarily affect the part of the brain that causes anterograde amnesia. Ideally, Sammy should be able not to pick up the electrified shape based on instinct within him that is generated from within apart that has nothing to do with the hippocampus part of the brain. As much as the movie portrays the loss of short memory, other systems within human beings allow us to make distinctions to continue living. Some of these abilities are instincts, which are inherent human characteristics which come into play when the body or brain has to make up for lack of a function.
This movie depicts that anterograde amnesia patients lose only their episodic memory part of their declarative memory. That is the sections dealing with autobiographical information and the short memory. Consequently, it is not the semantic part that deals with language, history, geography, and others; this is seen in the fact that Leonard can still communicate in his language but forgets ever having a conversations. Patients retain non-declarative or procedural memory, which deals with the learning of skills and habits. Leonard is still able to remember how to pick a call but cannot remember his conversations on the phone.
The relevant scholarship of this condition is continuous studies that gather and acquire new information that might help the world to understand anterograde amnesia fully. Many studies reveal that the condition is a permanent one and in recent alcohol and patients who have used prescriptions of benzodiazepines commonly known as tranquilizers such as, Valium and Xanax can cause anterograde amnesia. Currently, there is no specific medication available for the treatment of this condition. However, physicians have found some success with various types of therapy which includes working with an occupational therapist to replace the information that has been lost and as well as trying to develop strategies and increased use of technology to deal with the inability of forming long-lasting memories.
In conclusion, Memory loss or amnesia is not a very common condition, but cases of the same exist from the population. The loss occurs in different versions, and most of the patients react differently depending on whether the condition is semantic, episodic or procedural. All these memory types are managed by different complex components of the brain. From the movie Memento, it is seen as one of the greatest films in history to depict how individual suffering from anterograde amnesia behaves. The individual Leonard is not able to capture short memories but can still remember events that happened before his condition, which is a clear example of an impairment of the procedural memory. However, the movie is not very accurate in depicting all the characteristics of a patient suffering from the condition, and therefore we should go further to see also what scientists know about the condition. It is therefore imperative that people who suffer from loss of memory to be analysed and treated differently because amnesia is varied.
References
Galotti, K. M. (2017). Cognitive psychology in and out of the laboratory . Sage Publications.
Kauttonen, J., Hlushchuk, Y., Jääskeläinen, I. P., & Tikka, P. (2018). Brain mechanisms underlying cue-based memorizing during free viewing of movie Memento. NeuroImage .
Pepe, A., & Bollen, J. (2008, January). Between Conjecture and Memento: Shaping A Collective Emotional Perception of the Future. In AAAI Spring Symposium: Emotion, Personality, and Social Behavior (pp. 111-116).
