Anterograde Amnesia & Memento

By: Ryan Warner

Main concept• Anterograde amnesia is a loss of the ability

to create new memories after the event that caused the amnesia, leading to a partial or complete inability to recall the recent past, while long-term memories from before the event remain intact. The mechanism of storing memories is not well understood, although it is known that the regions involved are certain sites in the temporal cortex, especially the hippocampus and nearby subcortical regions.

• Retrieval is accessing information previously stored.

• Forgetting is the inability to retrieve information that has been previously stored.

• Explicit memories are memories of which a person is consciously aware.

• Recognition is the process of matching an external stimulus to a stored memory.

Supporting concepts:

Memento• Leonard Shelby suffers from

anterograde amnesia due to an injury incurred during his wife’s murder.

• He devotes his life to finding and killing the murderer that he believes is named John G.

• Since he cannot create new memories, he uses Polaroids and tattoos his body with clues to help solve the mystery of who John G. is.

Memento• Leonard relies on the help of

Teddy and Natalie, people he meets that try to help, but he is unsure if they can be trusted.

• The movie alternates between black and white and color sequences; the black and white scenes are chronological and the color scenes are reverse-chronological.

Connection

• The movie begins with Leonard waking up in a hotel room confused as to why he is there. The phone rings, he answers it and starts to speak to an unknown caller.

• He explains to the caller that he suffers from anterograde amnesia and can’t form new memories.

Opening scene…

• Leonard describes to the caller how one must have a system of notes to deal with the problem and a drive to use them.

• Here we learn that Leonard tattoos clues of his wife’s murder all over his body to help find the man responsible.

Opening scene cont’d…

• The caller then identifies himself as a police officer who has additional clues for Leonard about the murder of his wife.

• The caller claims to know who the murderer is and that he has set up a meet with him.

• They agree to meet in the lobby of the hotel during which the mystery caller requests Leonard refer to him as Teddy; he has to decide whether he can trust Teddy. From here on, we follow Leonard’s quest for the truth and observe his frustration with anterograde amnesia.

Opening scene cont’d…

Leonard: “I take it I told you about my condition?”Teddy: “Only every time I see ya.”

--------------------------------------------“If we talk for too long, I’ll forget how we started. Next time I see you, I’m not gonna remember this conversation. I don’t even know if I’ve met you before…I’ve told you this before, haven’t I?”

• These are examples of forgetting and how Leonard cannot retrieve his interactions with people.

Quotes that connect the concepts…

“ You know, I can remember so much. The feel of the world… her.

[sighs]

She’s gone. And the present is trivia, which I scribble down as fucking notes.”

• This quote illustrate Leonard’s explicit memory of his wife, as well as his attempt to recognize memories from his notes and tattoos.

Quotes that connect the concepts…

Here we see how Leonard’s anterograde amnesia affects his ability to store recent memories, which causes the confusion as to what he is doing.

This trailer illustrates Leonard’s head trauma he suffered during his wife’s murder (at 0:15 to 0:21), and his inability to store recent events as memories. This is where the damage to his temporal cortex/hippocampus occurs.

References• www.imdb.com• Searched “Memento”• Scroll down to the quotes tab in the “Did

You Know?” section.• Used verbatim quotes from the movie.

• www.Wikipedia.com• Searched “anterograde amnesia” for in

depth definition outside of notes.