166 • CHAPTER 6 Long-Term Memory: Structure
fi lm, the unconscious and badly wounded Bourne is plucked out of the water by a
fi shing boat. When he regains consciousness, he has no memory of his identity. As he
searches for his previous identity, he realizes people are out to kill him, but, because of
his memory loss, he doesn’t know why. Although Bourne has lost his episodic memories
of his past, his semantic memory appears to be intact, and, most interesting of all, he
has lost none of his procedural memories from his training as a CIA agent, including
ways to outsmart, outrun, and eliminate his adversaries.
Bourne’s situation is related to a rare condition called psychogenic fugue. Symptoms
of this condition include traveling away from where the person lives and a lack of mem-
ory for the past, especially personal information such as name, relationships, place of
residence, and occupation. In the few cases that have been reported, a person vanishes
from his or her normal life situation, often travels far away, and takes on a new identity
unrelated to the previous one (Coons & Milstein, 1992; Loewenstein, 1991).
A number of other movies revolve around a central character who loses his or her
identity or takes on a new one. In Who Am I? (1998), Jackie Chan, a top secret soldier,
loses his memory in a helicopter crash, triggering a quest to recover his identity. In Dead
Again (1991), a mystery woman played by Emma Thompson can’t remember anything
about her life. In The Long Kiss Goodnight (1996), Geena Davis plays a suburban
homemaker who begins remembering events from her previ-
ous life as a secret agent after suffering a blow to her head.
In other movies, the main character has trouble form-
ing new memories. For example, Lenny, the character played
by Guy Pearce in Memento (2000), continually forgets what
has just happened to him. This situation is based on cases
such as those of Clive Wearing and Jimmy G., who were
unable to form new memories and were therefore only able
to remember the current one or two minutes of their lives.
Lenny’s problem is apparently not as debilitating as in these
real-life cases, because he is able to function in the outside
world, although with some diffi culty. To compensate for his
inability to form new memories, Lenny records his experi-
ences with a Polaroid camera and has key facts tattooed on
his body (● Figure 6.14).
The use of terminology in movies that is not the same as
that used by psychologists is seen in Memento, where Lenny’s
problem is identifi ed as a loss of short-term memory. This
refl ects a common belief (at least among those who have not
taken a cognitive psychology course) that forgetting things
that have happened within the last few minutes or hours is a breakdown in short-term
memory. Cognitive psychologists, in contrast, identify short-term memory as memory
for what has happened in the last 15–30 seconds (or longer, if the events are rehearsed).
According to that defi nition, Lennie’s short-term memory was fi ne, because he could
remember what had just happened to him. His problem was that he couldn’t form new
long-term memories, so, like Clive Wearing and Jimmy G., he forgot everything that
had happened more than a few minutes previously.
Although some movies, like the ones already mentioned, are based at least loosely
on actual memory disorders, some stray farther into fi ction. Douglas Quaid, the char-
acter played by Arnold Schwarzenegger in Total Recall (1990), lives in a future world
in which it is possible to implant memories. Quaid makes the mistake of having an
artifi cial memory of a holiday on Mars implanted, which triggers a series of nightmar-
ish events.
The reverse of creating specifi c memories is selectively forgetting specifi c events.
This occasionally occurs, as when memories for particularly traumatic events are lost
(although sometimes the opposite happens, so traumatic events stand out in memory;
Porter & Birt, 2001). But the characters in The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
(2004) take the idea of selective forgetting to an extreme, by purposely undergoing a
high-tech procedure to selectively eliminate their memory for a previous relationship.● (^) FIGURE 6.14 Guy Pearce’s character, Lenny, from the fi lm
Memento. To deal with his memory problem, he had key facts
he wanted to remember tattooed on his body.
© Keline Howard/Sygma/Corbis
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