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. 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. Lacuna's offices have been cunningly art-directed to look like a low-rent plastic surgeon's, which is precisely the point. Memory erasure, in Eternal Sunshine's world, is just the next logical step up from breast augmentation and Prozac. For the record, using today's technology, it is not possible to selectively erase an entire person from your memory. But Eternal Sunshine still demonstrates a remarkably nuanced understanding of how the brain forms memories, particularly memories about intense emotional experiences.
The emphasis on feeling over data processing puts Eternal Sunshine squarely in the mainstream of the brain sciences today. We now know that the brain stores emotional memories very differently from unemotional ones. 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. 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. People incapable of forming long-term memories thanks to hippocampal damage can nonetheless form subconscious memories of traumatic events if their amygdala is intact. 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. In Eternal Sunshine, something like this happens. 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. (...)
To create a synaptic connection between two neurons—the associative link that is at the heart of all neuronal learning—you need protein synthesis. 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. It appears that instead of simply recalling a memory that had been forged days or months ago, the brain is forging it all over again, in a new associative context. In a sense, when we remember something, we create a new memory, one that is shaped by the changes that have happened to our brain since the memory last occurred to us.
Theoretically, if you could block protein synthesis in a human brain while triggering a memory, you could make a targeted erasure. The technicians at Lacuna Inc. appear to be doing something along these lines in the film. (...)
To create a synaptic connection between two neurons—the associative link that is at the heart of all neuronal learning—you need protein synthesis. 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. It appears that instead of simply recalling a memory that had been forged days or months ago, the brain is forging it all over again, in a new associative context. In a sense, when we remember something, we create a new memory, one that is shaped by the changes that have happened to our brain since the memory last occurred to us.
Theoretically, if you could block protein synthesis in a human brain while triggering a memory, you could make a targeted erasure. The technicians at Lacuna Inc. appear to be doing something along these lines in the film. (...)
(The Science of Eternal Sunshine. You can't erase your boyfriend from your brain, but the movie gets the rest of it right. By Steven Johnson)
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