Reading 6

This passage is taken from a book titled Welcome to Your Brain by Sandra Aamodt and Sam Wang (© 2008 by Sandra Aamodt and Sam Wang).

1. If you want to see what happens
2. when the brain goes out of whack,
3. please don’t go to the movies.
4. Movie characters are continually
5. getting themselves into
6. neurological “scrapes“, losing
7. their memories, changing
8. personalities, and getting
9. schizophrenia or Parkinson’s
10. disease (not to mention sociopathy
11. and other psychiatric disorders).
12. The brain goes haywire in
13. Hollywood far more often than in
14. real life, and sometimes it can be
15. hard to tell science from science
16. fiction. Movie depictions of mental
17. disorders span the spectrum from
18. mostly accurate to totally wrong.
19. At their worst, movie depictions
20. of neurological illness can
21. reinforce common, but wrong,
22. ideas about how the brain works.
23. By far the most common mental
24. disorder in the movies is amnesia.
25. Memory loss in the movies
26. constitutes its own genre, as
27. predictable as boy meets girl,
28. boy loses girl, and boy gets girl
29. back. But instead of losing a love
30. interest, the thing lost might
31. instead be, to pick an example,
32. the awareness that one is a
33. trained assassin, as in
34. The Bourne Identity (2002) or
35. Total Recall (1990).
36. Neuropsychologist Sallie Baxendale
37. conducted an extensive survey
38. of memory loss in the movies,
39. going all the way back to the
40. silent era. She sorted incidents
41. into categories, most of which are
42. filled with wrong science but all
43. of which are entertaining.
44. A common dramatic theme is
45. a physical trauma that triggers
46. memory loss, typically followed
47. by a new start of some kind.
48. Our hero or heroine then has a
49. series of adventures and
50. misadventures, but is able to live
51. normally and form new memories.
52. Another common cause of amnesia
53. in the movies is a psychologically
54. traumatic event. These events,
55. which satisfy the dramatic need
56. to drive the plot, include anything
57. from killing someone to getting
58. married. As a final twist, a
59. character might regain his or
60. her memory by getting whacked
61. in the head a second time, or
62. through a brilliant act of
63. neurosurgery, hypnosis, or
64. the sight of a significant and
65. well-loved object from the past.
66. Roll credits.
67. Perhaps we have unfairly
68. mocked these depictions of
69. memory loss. After all, psychiatric
70. disorders show more diverse
71. symptoms than the strictly
72. neurological disorders stemming
73. from physical injury or disease.
74. For instance, a psychiatric patient
75. might show selective amnesia in
76. very specialized ways. Also,
77. transient memory loss is known
78. to occur spontaneously,
79. possibly because of miniature
80. stroke-like events.
81. But Hollywood usually tells us
82. that the memory loss started
83. with an injury or traumatic event,
84. and in this regard the targets of
85. our criticism are fair game.
86. Cinema may be ripe for scientific
87. criticism, but it does provide
88. insight into how people think the
89. brain works.
90. A conceptual underpinning to
91. many cinematic misconceptions is
92. an idea we will call
93. “brains are like old televisions.”
94. Consider a common dramatic
95. convention: after a blow to the
96. head induces memory loss,
97. memory can be restored by a
98. second blow to the head.
99. The existence of this myth points
100. to unspoken assumptions
101. we make about how the
102. brain works. For the second-blow
103. hypothesis to be true, damage to
104. the brain would have to
105. be reversible. Since the likeliest
106. cause of amnesia from a head
107. injury would be a fluid
108. accumulation that pushes on the
109. brain, a therapeutic benefit from
110. a second injury would be pretty
111. unlikely, to say the least.