Reccos: Memento

It is Anterograde amnesia.

“Anterograde amnesia is a loss of the ability to create new memories after the event that caused the amnesia, leading to a partial or complete inability to recall the recent past, while long-term memories from before the event remain intact.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anterograde_amnesia

You are taking Lenny’s initial dialogues about not remembering anything after the accident to be 100% correct while you ignored all the dialogues in the end.

The FAQs that I gave you already explained that. Here it is again. Read it in full.

“Leonard makes a statement in the film that he can not create new memories. Some take this as literal truth of something we must believe and others have claimed it is a flaw on Nolan’s part of the reality of this condition. The simplest explanation is that it is a “simplification” and an imprecision in what Leonard states. Most people do not nit-pick everything they say. [This is akin to Leonard saying he does not have “amnesia”. He is simplifying for Burt: he means that he does not have “retrograde amnesia”, which is what most people think of when they hear the term “amnesia”. In reality, Leonard does have amnesia. Leonard has anterograde amnesia]. The movie clearly indicates that Leonard can create new procedural memories via habit and routine. In fact with this condition, implicit memory creation (procedural memories are only one type of implicit memory) is not affected at all, since it occurs through other parts of the brain. Therefore people with this condition are able to create new memories: implicit memory creation is completely unaffected.

The implication about this statement is not so much about the implicit memory creation that the movie discusses, but about the explicit memory creation. This condition causes an impairment in the ability of someone to create new explicit memories. But even this impairment is not absolute. Even some new explicit memories may be created: “Amnesia is not an all-or-nothing condition, and even H.M., from time to time, has meagre conscious recollections of information encountered postoperatively”. HM’s was a “pure case” caused by surgery and not an accident. He had epileptic seizures and the doctors believed that if they removed some of his temporal lobe (including the hippocampus), then he would no longer get them. The doctors were correct: they cured him of his seizures! He also got this condition since (it was later discovered) that the hippocampus (more generally the MTL: media temporal lobe) is important to the “consolidation” of memory (converting the short-term to long-term memory).]

Nolan also suggests (provides us a clue to) this fact when he shows us a shot which may be interpreted of a memory of Leonard in a mental institute: a memory he could not have if the condition were absolute. It appears that Nolan does suggest how it is possible and why this type of memory is retained. The flash of Sammy turning into Leonard in the mental institute suggests to many a “projection” of Leonard recollections onto Sammy memories. The anchor of the recollection is the Sammy memory. It is important to realize, that this condition does not force Leonard to start with a “clean state”. His memories are not “erased”. The short term memories are just typically not consolidated into long-term memories. But, Leonard does have experiences after the attack and “on some level” bits are recalled: though maybe only subconsciously, and some relegated to show up only as “conditioning” (some probably to his surprise – when did I learn to do that?) other things only “recalled” as only distant memories. These are the implicit, non-declarative memories.

For example, in Oliver Sacks’ book: The Man who Mistook his wife for a Hat, he has an entire chapter on a man named “Jimmy G.” who got this condition (anterograde memory dysfunction) from chronic alcoholism (this is termed “Korsakoff’s syndrome”). Sacks states: “He [Jimmie] sometimes retained faint memories, some dim echo or sense of familiarity. Thus five minutes after I had played tic-tac-toc [sic] with him, he recollected that “some doctor” had played this with him ‘a while back’ – whether the ‘while back’ was minutes or months ago he had no idea.”

Also, this condition does allow you to learn thru conditioning (as mentioned many times in the movie), but some things may “break thru” that “typically won’t”. “Jimmy G” is also discussed online: “Jimmy was stuck in the year 1945, it turned out. He only remembered one or two events since that year. (One was the death of his brother, which says something about the relationship of emotions and encoding.)”

Studies on people with this condition have concluded: “factual information, which is ordinarily learned as declarative (conscious) knowledge and with the participation of the medial temporal lobe, can be acquired as nondeclarative memory” which is a means of saying that explicit memories can be learned from implicit memories as has been hypothesized as a mechanism for what Nolan appears to have suggested. As stated this is enhanced by Leonard’s knowledge of Sammy and his explicit memories of Sammy. It has been pointed out in the classic AMD case of H.M. that “experiments demonstrate that H.M. is capable of learning some new factual information when it can be fixed to already acquired knowledge.” This paper even the suggests that this can lead to false memories due to incorrect anchoring. H.M. seems to have anchored some of the Challenger explosion (which happened after his AMD) with his memories of the Titanic disaster. This type of misrembering seems to also be suggested in the film especially in the sequence of Sammy in a mental institute that turns into Leonard as someone nurse walks by. “

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0209144/faq#.2.1.29