YOUR MEMORIESof their emotional salience and vividness. Similarly, when a person’s life
is in danger, there’s a chance that they will later develop post-traumatic
stress disorder, part of which involves involuntary vivid flashbacks to
the traumatic experience.
Emotional or traumatic memories activate the amygdala housed in
the temporal lobes (see p.39). It’s believed that this triggers the release of
the stress hormones adrenaline and noradrenaline, which subsequently
influences the storage of memories in the hippocampus, somehow
causing them to be particularly entrenched.
Baxendale also highlights two films that provide a refreshingly
accurate portrayal of amnesia. The first is Memento (2000), starring Guy
Pearce as Leonard, a man who develops amnesia after sustaining a
head injury during an attack that leaves his wife dead. Leonard retains
his identity and short-term memory, and spends the rest of the film
hunting his wife’s killer, all the while resorting to extreme measures,
such as tattooing clues on his body, in an attempt to compensate
for his memory problems. The other film is Finding Nemo (2003), an
animation which features an amnesic tropical fish, Dory, who struggles
to retain new information and pushes the patience of her friends to the
limit – just as happens with real-life amnesics.Struggling to remember. Guy Pearce and Carrie-Anne Moss in
Memento (2000).