Reflection on 'Memento' - a Real-Based Psychological Thriller

Christipher Nolan’s 2001 psychological thriller movie Memento is based on a man named Leonard Shelby who tries tracking down the man who raped and murdered his wife. Leonard suffers from a rare memory loss. This means that he can remember everything before he suffered an incident, but he cannot remember stuff that happened a few minutes ago. This makes it even more difficult to find the truth to what happened to his wife.

Leonard suffers from anterograde amnesia. This is a condition where the person suffers long term memory loss. He cannot retain new memories for no longer than a few minutes. Because of this, Leonard, takes polaroids of people and places, and writes notes on the back of them. He also gets tattoos of what his mission is. This is important because this helps him remind himself after a few minutes and days. There are at least three to six categories of theories of forgetting. The first one is trace decay. Trace Decay means that your memories all fade as time goes on. This theory focuses on time and STM. So maybe we cannot remember our 5th birthday. That is because years have passed, and those memories have decayed from our brain. The next theory is displacement. It is said that your STM can only store so much, so when new information comes in some old information is displaced or forgotten. For example, I cannot remember a lot about the subject math. This is because that information has been knocked out by my brain to store new information that I do enjoy. Interference is when memories disrupt one another. This can affect for STM and LTM. We can see this in the movie when Leonard sees his notes and some of them are all over the place. The memories he no longer remembers interfered with his thoughts and stuff said to him by others that now he’s confused. Lack of consideration theory is when we take new information, and we need a certain amount of time for changes to be done in the nervous system. Forgetting can occur when we don’t pay much attention to them. The next is retrieval failure. Retrieval failure is when memories are store in the LTM, but cannot be accessed. It is said that these memories are available but cannot be accessible. Sometimes when you feel like you have a word in the tip of your tongue, but you just can’t remember can be an example of retrieval failure. The last one is motivated forgetting which is when someone does not want to remember something. This usually happens if a person went through a traumatic experience. They will purposely block that experience to stay healthy mentally.

We can use cognitive psychology to help Leonard regain his memory. We can keep track of language, attention, and the memories he does have in order to help him expand his memories. I think we can also use behavioral neuroscience. We can track his behavior and see what affects it. By doing this we can help bring up memories and see how well he takes his emotions. Information is passed from sensory to STM by process of attention. This is selective information that a person focuses more on. Then it goes from STM to LTM usually if you don’t use this memory enough. This can later be forgotten, or retrieval failure can happen. Eyewitness testimony and repressed memories can be biased. Every time we remember something, we remember it a bit differently each time. For example, let's say you witness a car crash. When you’re telling the police what you saw, will it be exactly on point? The answer is no. Your brain will switch bits and pieces about it. In the movie when Leonard witnesses his wife being attacked, he goes to help her, but then he gets hit which is what causes his condition. Throughout the movie he keeps remembering that same memory, but it’s different than how it really happened. He thought the whole time that his wife was murdered there, but she wasn’t. She survived the attack. Our brain sometimes changes things up to help us cope with the situation. Hypnosis is a human condition involving awareness and focused attention it also really involves relatation. I think hypnosis wouldn’t really help Leonard because he’d keep forgetting everything he remembers from it within a matter of minutes. Also, according to chapter 4 of the textbook hypnosis can sometimes bring up false memories. So even if the doctors used hypnosis on Leonard there is a possibility that his brain will make up fake memories to keep himself safe. The fake memories can also be created by Leonard to match what he wants to believe. I don’t think this would help him remember memories in his short-term memory. If I were forced to either give up my STM or LTM I think I should choose my STM. This is because I would like to remember my memories from months and years ago. Memories that are meaningful to me. If I give up my STM then I think I wouldn’t really be doing anything important or meaningful in my life anymore, so those memories won’t really matter.

In Memento, I learned that memory can be changed by ourselves without knowing to make us happy. For example, Leonard thought the whole time that his wife was raped and murdered, but she wasn’t. His wife was diabetic, and on one day she wanted to understand Leonards' condition, so she kept telling him it was time for her shot knowing he loved her and wouldn’t do anything to hurt her. Because of Leonards' condition he would forget he already gave her the shot, so he gave it to her three times. She passed away from an overdose. Leonards' memories changed this situation thinking it was another couple who did this. Since he couldn’t deal with the fact that he killed his own wife. His brain did this to make him feel safe and better.

Leonard created a whole new story in his mind to deal with the loss of his wife. He couldn’t deal with the true story, so he had to create a new story to match his beliefs. He created an investigation that was never ending. Maybe if he tried getting help by the end of the movie, we could have been able to see him recover some memories.