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![]() Studies on rats suggest that if you block protein synthesis during the execution of learned behavior-pushing a lever to get food, for instance-the learned behavior disappears. To create a synaptic connection between two neurons-the associative link that is at the heart of all neuronal learning-you need protein synthesis. But some scientists now believe that memories effectively get rewritten every time they’re activated, thanks to a process called reconsolidation. When your brain remembered something, it was simply searching through the stacks and then reading aloud from whatever passage it discovered. The fact that Joel is re-experiencing these memories as they’re being deleted is consistent with one influential recent theory about how targeted memory erasure might be possible.įor a long time, memory researchers assumed that memories were like volumes stored in a library. There are several instances in the movie where Clementine appears to have a trace emotional memory of an event that has been wiped from her waking mind. In Eternal Sunshine, something like this happens. Someone suffering from the Memento condition would likely have a feeling of general unease encountering a person or a situation that had caused them harm in the past, though they wouldn’t be able to put their finger on what was making them uncomfortable. People incapable of forming long-term memories thanks to hippocampal damage can nonetheless form subconscious memories of traumatic events if their amygdala is intact. Particularly traumatic memories appear to be captured by two separate parts of the brain: the hippocampus, the normal seat of memory, and the amygdala, one of the brain’s emotional centers. Negative emotional memories, for instance, tend to capture more details about the experience than positive ones: You remember the general feeling of a nice day at the beach, but you remember every little detail of the two seconds when that Buick crashed into you back in high school. We now know that the brain stores emotional memories very differently from unemotional ones. ![]() The emphasis on feeling over data processing puts Eternal Sunshine squarely in the mainstream of the brain sciences today. “It’s amazing how strong this feeling is.” “I really want her to pick me up,” the grown-up Joel says, as he relives the experience. There’s a wonderful throwaway line at one point in the film, where Joel is reliving a memory of hiding under the kitchen table as a 4-year-old, calling out for his mother. In Eternal Sunshine, the richness of memory is as much about emotion as raw data. The fading of memory in Memento is about the loss of pure information, like an erased hard drive. ![]() Memento revolved around an older model of memory formation, from the days when the brain was imagined as a wetware computer. The film displays a more subtle model of memory formation than the acclaimed thriller Memento, in which a man incapable of forming long-term memories hunts down a killer he furiously scribbles clues onto Polaroids before his memory fades to black. ![]() But Eternal Sunshine still demonstrates a remarkably nuanced understanding of how the brain forms memories, particularly memories about intense emotional experiences. It’s on a par with a night of heavy drinking, nothing you’ll miss.”įor the record, using today’s technology, it is not possible to selectively erase an entire person from your memory. DNA” à la Jurassic Park * or some hopeless jargon about “hacking into the neocortex.” The closest you get is a nervous conversation between Joel and his doctor: “Is there any risk of brain damage?” The doctor replies, “Technically speaking, the procedure is brain damage. But despite the futurist premise, Sunshine spares us the gratuitous speech explaining How It All Works. When Clementine (Kate Winslet’s character) first decides to shed her memories of Joel (played by Jim Carrey), she does it “on a lark,” the way you might get your forehead Botoxed on a whim. Memory erasure, in Eternal Sunshine’s world, is just the next logical step up from breast augmentation and Prozac. Lacuna’s offices have been cunningly art-directed to look like a low-rent plastic surgeon’s, which is precisely the point. The film, as you may already know, tells the story of two star-crossed lovers whose stars have gotten so crossed that they decide to erase their memories of each other, using the services of a company called Lacuna Inc. One of the many rewarding parts of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is the fact that the film contains almost no dialogue that sounds like actual neuroscience.
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