Memento Movie Psychology

“Memento”
Memento presents the subject of amnesia, which is a very popular Hollywood topic. In this case the main character, Leonardo, suffers from short-term memory loss due to a head injury. Leonardo’s goal is to find his wife’s murderer, but his condition makes it hard for him to do so. Leonardo fights his condition by writing notes to himself or tattooing his body with the information he gathers about people and places. He actually believes that this strategy is even better than remembering because memory is unreliable. According to Leonardo, "Memory can change the shape of a room; it can change the color of a car. And memories can be distorted. They're just an interpretation, they're not a record, and they're irrelevant if you have the
In the movie, Leonardo narrates the story of Sammy, a man who also could not form short-term memories. Psychologists went to Sammy’s house and conducted an experiment in which every time Sammy touches a specific object he receives a small electric shock. Unfortunately, Sammy is unable to form associations and conditioning does not work for him. However, it works for Leonardo. He explicitly states that he conditioned himself to look at his “remember Sammy” tattoo to remind him of his condition. He has also conditioned himself to check his pockets and body for notes and information in order to survive. He becomes able to avoid harmful people and situations based on instinct and not
More particularly, in one scene, Leonardo is worried that he might forget the information that he just learned and for this reason he rehearses this information in his mind until he finds a piece of paper on which he can write this information. Internal rehearsal, “much like a ‘loop’ of recording tape that goes around and around, playing the same song over and over (175),” helps maintain auditory memories in the working memory. If this rehearsal is interrupted phonological storage cannot occur. In fact, “without rehearsal people can hold only about 2 seconds worth of information in their phonological memory (174).” According to research articulatory suppression can hinder the beneficial mechanism of rehearsal. Psychologists have tested this by asking people to remember lists of items. In one condition, the participants were asked to simply read/learn, and then recall, a list of words after a delay. The second condition was identical except that now the participants were asked to articulate irrelevant phonological codes (e.g. Blah blah blah blah) during the delay period. As it was expected verbalization of irrelevant words during the delay blocked the rehearsal process and resulted to the decay of the phonological memory