Neurologically Accurate, Too!

Rating: 10/10 (18 July 2001)

It amazes (and amuses) me that people with zero knowledge of neurobiology and psychology can deign to criticize the science of the movie. Well, take it from someone who just took an advanced undergrad seminar in the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory at Harvard (and got an A, too) -- the science in the movie is stone-cold rock-solid. I've just seen it a second time, and it struck me just how much Leonard emphasizes the role of what cognitive psychology calls "procedural memory" (and which Leonard quite reasonably calls "habit" or "instinct") in explaining why he's as functional as he is. Procedural memory is spared in even the worst cases of anterograde amnesia caused by medial temporal lobe (hippocampus, etc.) damage. And there are cases of people with amnesia as bad as Leonard's who are not institutionalized, but who live at home with their spouses and a system of notes and reminders (emphasis on "system").
POSSIBLE SPOILER . . I also want to chime in on one of the plot points that is much debated. Near the end of the movie, Teddy tells Leonard that he's lying to himself about something crucial (and, in fact, transferring the memory of what happened to him so that he remembers it happening to someone else. You know what I'm talking about, right?) Most people I've talked to regard the question of whether Teddy is lying about this as ambiguous. It's not. Sure, people misremember things that are too painful to remember accurately, as Teddy claims Leonard has done. But you have to remember first, before you can misremember. Had this really happened to Leonard (as Teddy claims) and not someone else (as Leonard remembers), Leonard could have had no motive to transfer the memory -- he would have forgotten the whole incident fifteen minutes later.