Interpreting the Film Memento
Part 3: Can Memory be Trusted?
This is the third of my four-part series of articles about Christopher Nolan’s 2000 neo-noir psychological thriller film, Memento. My first two postings can be found here:
Leonard, the main character in the film, states repeatedly that memory cannot be trusted. That particular claim is backed up by a large body of scientific research. I will summarize a few of the main scientific findings in this article.
When I cover the topic of memory in college courses I teach, I ask the students to do the following in-class assignment:
Take a minute or so to remember some of your most precious early childhood memories. Pick a memory that seems most vivid and write a one paragraph description about what you remember. When you have finished, turn in your assignment at the front desk.
I invite the reader to complete this assignment yourself before reading on.
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After all of the assignments are turned in, I announce to the class that the memories they described most likely never actually happened. As you might expect, my assertion meets with a high level of resistance. I suspect it does for you also if you completed the assignment. In fact, it does for me also if I evaluate how this assertion feels on a personal level. However, the scientific evidence is clear. Leonard was right. Memory cannot be trusted.
Memories Change Over Time
From a personal (non-scientific) perspective, it often feels as though our memories provide us with information similar to what would have been recorded if a video camera had been attached to our foreheads throughout our lives. However, scientific evidence demonstrates that if we want to think of our memories in terms of an analogy to a videotape, we will need to imagine that the tape has some of the following characteristics. Something on the order of 99.9% of the original video has now faded to the point that if you play it back you discover most of it is blank. Occasionally you come across a short snippet of an image, but most of those images are so blurry and fuzzy that it is pretty hard to make out what is going on. Very occasionally you come across a snippet that is vivid, in high contrast, and you can see lots of details about what is going on. But when those vivid sections of the tape are examined with special technical equipment, something really peculiar is discovered. None of those vivid images are original recordings. The original recordings have been written over numerous times and all of the vivid details were added during the re-recordings. What is worse, many of the details in these re-recorded images are different from what was present on the original recording. To add insult to injury, as you watch this tape, you, the viewer of the tape, have absolutely no way to differentiate which of the images on the tape are original recordings (true memories), and which are added images of events that were not in the original recording (false memories).
So what would you have to do if you were asked some question about your past, and your only source of information was what was recorded on the tape? All you could do is playback the tape and try to reconstruct what happened based on the sparse snippets of images (true and false) that are present on the tape. Psychologically, you might have confidence in your reconstruction, but from a scientific perspective, you would have to admit that the reconstruction could not really be trusted.
Memories have the perverse characteristic that some of the ones that seem the most vivid and have the most details are precisely the ones that are most likely to be false! This is because the memories that are most meaningful to us are the ones we think about the most. And each time we think about a memory a few new details can be added in and a few others dropped. Like children playing the game of telephone tag, details are added and dropped at each stage of the remembering/retelling until at the end the story often has little resemblance to the original.
Source Misattribution
In addition to creating false memories by modifying true memories over time, sometimes false memories are created from the beginning. These are referred to as implanted false memories. In some cases, implanted memories describe events that actually happened, but they are still false because we think we experienced the event when in actual fact we only learned about it from some other source. This is referred to as source misattribution. For example, we might have a vivid memory of a childhood birthday party and think we are remembering the actual event. However, the memory was implanted later in life as we viewed photographs of the event, heard our parents and other relatives tell stories about the event, etc.
Implanted Memories of Events that Never Happened
More troubling are implanted false memories of events that never happened. These are surprisingly easy to create in adults as well as children as demonstrated in numerous scientific studies. Across a number of experiments using various methods of memory implantation, it has been found that somewhere in the range of 30% to 50% of subjects sometimes report remembering events that never actually happened.
The bottom line is that the properties of the memory faculty cannot be relied upon to provide a factual account of the events that have happened to us during our lifetime. Instead, they provide us with meaningful stories about ourselves that we use to guide and motivate our actions. Evolutionary psychology theories emphasize that our early human ancestors did not survive as individuals, but by living in social groups. Being able to survive as part of a social group requires many traits that support the group rather than the individual. These include feelings of strong loyalty to the group and being highly motivated to play roles that aid the group such as cooperating with others and following orders from group leaders. Constructing stories (memories) in which we identify with these roles was very likely adaptive to our ancestors and helps explain why memories evolved to operate in this way.
Implications of Leonard’s Assertion that Memories Cannot Be Trusted
Having established that Leonard’s repeated claims that memories cannot be trusted and that his assertions are consistent with scientific findings about memory, let's drill down a little bit about what that emphasis might mean in terms of interpretation of the film.
Viewed broadly, the film might be making a thematic statement about the properties of memories as they exist in humans in general.
Narrowing the focus somewhat, these assertions might also pertain to memories generated by the film itself on viewers. As I illustrated in my previous article, the color scenes can be interpreted as representing perception and the black-and-white scenes as representing memory. Viewers of the film use the memory scenes to interpret the perception scenes. Leonard’s repeated emphasis that memory cannot be trusted might be telling viewers to be careful — Our interpretations of the events in the film might be distorted or wrong because we made those interpretations on the basis of black-and-white scenes that implanted false memories.
Narrowing the focus even further, Leonard’s assertions might additionally be self-references to his own memories. Leonard’s life is completely dominated by one goal, finding John G who raped and murdered his wife. Where did Leonard get that goal from? It was derived from his memories. Not from ordinary biologically based memories because Leonard suffers from a neurological condition that prevents him from forming memories. Rather, Leonard’s purpose in life derives from the artificial memory system he has created using notes and tattoos.
Can that artificial memory system be trusted? Can Leonard be trusted? I will take up those topics in my next, and final, posting on this topic.
Ron Boothe
psyrgb@emory.edu
My fourth, and final, article on this topic can be found here:
