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be erased?
    In Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), the main character seeks to obliterate
    memories of a relationship gone wrong by going to a professional outfit that provides such
    a service for a price. In the movie, the character is strapped down and goes to sleep while
    technicians rummage through his head. They play back memories and pick out the ones that
    need to be erased.
    One idea implicit in this sequence is that neural activity somehow encodes explicit,
    movielike representations of remembered experiences. Perhaps the logic is not entirely
    cracked—experience does appear to be reduced and compressed as it is converted to
    something that the brain can store—but the result is not a full replay of the event (see
    Chapter 1 ). Recollection of a visual scene does trigger brain responses that resemble in
    some ways the responses that arise from viewing a scene for the first time. Another part is
    less fantastic than it may sound: the idea that one can locate an offending memory, play it
    back, then erase it like an unwanted computer file. Research in the past few years suggests
    that recollection of a memory also reinforces the memory. There is good evidence that we
    “erase” and “rewrite” our memories every time we recall them, suggesting that if it were
    ever possible to erase specific content, playing it back first might be an essential
    component.
    In a more realistic (but totally revolting) depiction of brain injury, we have the sequel to The
    Silence of the Lambs (1991), Hannibal (2001), in which gradual invasion (oh, let’s not mince words
    —the cutting up and cooking of a person’s brain) causes progressive loss of function. Putting aside
    the difficulty of carrying out such brain surgery without killing the patient, here at least we have a
    situation in which damage to the brain leads to proportional loss of function.
    In the thicket of misleading and silly depictions of the brain in popular entertainment, a few
    counterexamples stand out in which the science is accurate. Scientific accuracy is not necessary for a
    satisfying dramatic experience, of course, but it does seem possible to maintain accuracy, attract
    critical approbation, and experience commercial success all at once. Various brain disorders are
    depicted both accurately and sympathetically in the movies Memento , Sé Quién Eres , Finding Nemo ,
    and A Beautiful Mind .
    Memento (2000) accurately describes the problems faced by Leonard, who has severe
    anterograde amnesia. Due to a head injury, Leonard cannot form lasting new memories. In addition,
    he has difficulty retaining information held in immediate memory and, when distracted, loses track of
    his train of thought. The effect is cleverly induced in the viewer’s mind by showing the sequence of
    events in reverse order, starting with the death of a character, and ending with a scene that reveals the
    meaning of all the subsequent events.
    The symptoms suffered by Leonard are similar to those experienced by people with damage to the
    hippocampus and related structures. The hippocampus is a horn-shaped structure that in humans is
    about the size and shape of a fat man’s curled pinkie finger; we have one hippocampus on each side
    of our brains. The hippocampus and the parts of the brain that link to it, such as the temporal lobe of
    the cerebral cortex, are needed for the short-term storage of new facts and experiences. These
    structures also seem to be important for eventual long-term storage of memories; patients with
    temporal lobe or hippocampal damage, such as from a stroke, often are unable to recall events in the
    weeks and months before the damage.
    In Memento , the accident that triggers Leonard’s amnesia is depicted with remarkable fidelity,
    right down to the part of his head that receives an injury, the temporal lobe of the cortex. The resulting
    loss of function is also accurate, with the possible exception that unlike many patients with