English Audio Request

Anterograde amnesia is not that sexy. It doesn't allow you to slap a new identity on a person and until a few years ago it didn't sell scripts. Then, in 2000, came the film Memento. Guy Pearce plays Leonard, an insurance investigator who, following a blow to the head, is unable to remember anything that happens to him. Since he is looking for his wife's killer, it's important that he logs each new lead. So he compensates for his condition by taking snaps with a Polaroid camera, annotating them, and tattooing important facts on his body.
Della Sala says the scriptwriters force Leonard to repeat a howler: "He keeps saying he has a short term memory problem, but that's wrong, he has anterograde amnesia." In other words, it's not that he loses memories, it's that he can't form them in the first place.
Finding Nemo, on the other hand, is top of Della Sala's amnesia class. In this Walt Disney/Pixar cartoon about fish, the amnesiac Dory is advised to swim through a trench rather than over it, to avoid danger. When she arrives at the trench she says she feels compelled to swim through it, but doesn't know why. "They did their homework," says Della Sala. "She remembers the emotion linked to some particular event, but not the event itself, which is exactly what people with amnesia do."