"Since my injury, I can't make new memories... everything fades. If we talk for too long, I'll forget how we started, and the next time we meet, I'm not going to remember ever having this conversation." Memento (2000) Christopher Nolan, Dir.
"He had lost the ability to form new memories," says the article. "For the next 55 years, each time he met a friend, each time he ate a meal, each time he walked in the woods, it was as if for the first time." The NYTimes, Dec. 6, 2008
an interesting thing - the fourth most emailed article today in the times is this obit on a man who had no short-term memory at all. The story is inherently fascinating - due to a slip of the knife on some brain surgery, took on the condition that we all know best from the movie which made a hit director of Nolan (later to do Dark Knight).
The research scientist who worked with H.M. - Dr. Brenda Millner - studied him for the next five decades, and based on this, transformed how scientists understood memory to work.
but what struck me was: why is this the fourth most emailed article?
It seems H.M. is, indeed, the best known subject of the vast neurobiology community that lives online, and his death at the age of 82 was important news. And perhaps also the revelation of the real story behind someone all the scientists had known merely by his initials: "H.M."
no one mentioned the film Memento.
but why did i, too, instantly click on this story? and then lose all interest in what i had been searching for before? and then click on another link, below it, about another amnesia victim who lost all memory of who he was some six years after he'd left his job in Bdlg. 7 early - and thus walked through the world trade towers fifteen minutes before they were hit?
and then it occurred to me: this forgetting everything the moment it's happened, this having every single moment be new, be Now - is this glimpse memory? the fractured, fleeting experience of tidbit after disconnected tidbit that we experience as we float through the web? do we not, in a way, envy him?
and i'm positing that we're fascinated by someone who remembers nothing, who experiences each encounter as if for the first time, because this is, in fact, the new standard for our own sense of entertainment.
Memento, the film, was an example of what I call The Breakdown of Now - ripping up the single, chronological Now of a film to use this perspective as part of the story.
the random-access approach to memory strikes me as, somehow, being very glimpse, very much where we are right now.
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