Welcome to Understanding Memory. Someone once said that memory is fascinating because sometimes we forget what we want to remember, sometimes we remember what we want to forget, and sometimes we remember events that never happened or never happened the way we remember them. I want to show you how memory works, why it sometimes fails, and what we can do to enhance it. Based on my recent book – Memory and Movies: What Films Can Teach Us About Memory (MIT Press, 2015) – I will provide an introduction to the scientific study of human memory by focusing on a select group of topics that hold widespread appeal. To facilitate your understanding, I will use clips from numerous films to illustrate different aspects of memory – describing what has been learned about memory in a nontechnical way for people with no prior background in psychology. Many of us love watching movies because they offer an unparalleled opportunity for entertainment, even if entertaining films are not always scientifically accurate. Still, I believe that we can learn a lot about memory from popular films, if we watch them with an educated eye. Welcome once more. I am looking forward to showing you what movies can teach us about memory. John Seamon Professor of Psychology Emeritus Wesleyan University
Lecture 19: Lost and Found Memories: Dissociative Amnesia - Film: The Return of the Soldier
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來自 Wesleyan University 的課程
Understanding Memory: Explaining the Psychology of Memory through Movies
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從本節課中
Understanding the Reality of Amnesia
Amnesia has often been portrayed in film as resulting from a bump on the head and cured by another head bonk. In real life, amnesia can follow physical or emotional trauma, it may be temporary or permanent, and if it resolves, it is never from another blow to the head.
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John SeamonProfessor Emeritus
Psychology
[MUSIC]
In my book in the chapter called, When Troubling Memories Persist,
I provide detailed coverage of memory for traumatic experiences.
In this lecture I'll describe how traumatic memory might relate to amnesia.
Normally we remember traumatic experiences well but
on rare occasions an intense experience may be forgotten.
A failure of remembering, in which there is no evidence of
a precipitating brain injury is called functional amnesia.
Historically, this type of amnesia has been linked to an emotionally traumatic
experience, as dramatized in Alford Hitchcock's classic film, Spellbound.
[MUSIC]
I have no memory.
It's like looking into a mirror and seeing nothing but the mirror.
And yet the image is there.
I know it's there.
>> In Spellbound,
Gregory Peck plays a psychiatrist who is unable to remember his past.
As the story unfolds, we learn that his memory loss
is based on his long standing guilt over accidentally killing his brother.
>> I know.
You were ill. Loss of memory is not a difficult problem.
>> Yes, I know. Amnesia, a trick of the mind for
remaining sane.
You remain sane by forgetting something too horrible to remember.
>> What conditions give rise to functional amnesia?
Case studies suggest that after experiencing a highly stressful event
such as public humiliation or the death of a loved one,
some individuals may forget that event and things related to it.
Trauma based amnesia is assumed if those people
had no precipitation brain injuries.
However the lack of a precipitating brain injury
does not mean that functional amnesia is an emotional response to trauma.
In some cases of functional amnesia, prior brain injuries have been reported
making it hard to specify the origin of this memory loss.
Specifying how trauma produces amnesia is a problem
because traumatic events are most often remembered.
If a traumatic experience can produce amnesia,
some process must produce the forgetting.
Two different accounts have been offered to explain traumatic forgetting.
Some theorists have attributed this forgetting to the idea of repression.
The idea that a person's access to troubling memories can be blocked from
awareness by a psychological process that produces self-protective forgetting.
But finding compelling evidence for this process has proven difficult.
On the other hand,
explaining traumatic forgetting with suppression is also problematic.
If you try to suppress unpleasant thoughts by trying not to think about them,
these attempts can have the opposite effect of keeping them in mind.
The psychological and
biological processes underlying functional amnesia remain undetermined.
What is known is that this type of amnesia is rare.
It can clear up spontaneously in days or
weeks, with many people recovering their forgotten memories.
Functional amnesia is clinically described as a dissociative disorder,
an alteration of consciousness that affects a person's memory and identity.
Dissociative disorders are rare,
but dissociative experiences are relatively common.
[SOUND] Have you ever caught yourself day dreaming while driving around a familiar
road, only later to not remember things that you passed along the way?
This inability to remember your drive is an amnesia-like experience.
But in this example, your failure to remember is normal because
you let your attention wander, rather than keeping it focused on the road.
This is a dissociative experience, not a dissociative disorder,
because no matter where your attention wandered during the drive,
you maintained your sense of identity and remembered your past.
For people with functional amnesia, their experience is different.
Some of them can lose their memory for only a portion of their past.
Others can lose their identity along with their memory.
And still others might create multiple identities, each with different memories.
These variations of functional amnesia are called Dissociative Amnesia,
Dissociative Fugue, and Dissociative Identity Disorder.
In this lecture, I will focus on Dissociative Amnesia.
People with Dissociative Amnesia retain their identity, but
forget a portion of their past related to some stressful event.
During previous wars, for example, soldiers with no signs of head
wounds have reported retrograde memory loss after severe combat.
Faking amnesia to avoid future combat is always a possibility,
as most soldiers find it hard to forget their war time experiences.
But anecdotes of forgetting by soldiers exist,
even if their forgetting remains unexplained.
This phenomenon, initially called Shell-Shock in World War I,
was the basis for Rebecca West's novel, The Return of the Soldier.
In it, she tells of a soldier returning home from war, who kept his identity,
but forgot the last 20 years of his life.
Her story is dramatized in Allan Bridge's film,
of the same name, featuring Julie Christy, Glenda Jackson.
Ann Margaret and Alan Bates.
[MUSIC]
>> So you're leaving in the morning.
>> Good evening, Sir.
I've just met a friend of yours who said that...
>> Excuse me.
Yes, that's right.
This time tomorrow, God willing, I'll be on my way to France.
>> Lucky devil.
>> After leaving his wife Kitty at their English estate, Captain Chris Baldry,
a middle aged gentleman, sets off for
France to lead a war time infantry brigade.
The year was 1914.
[MUSIC]
[NOISE] >> Mrs Gray?
>> Yes.
>> Are you Mrs. Baldry?
>> Yes, I am.
How do you do?
>> Two years later,
a woman named Margaret travels to his estate with an urgent request.
>> Please, you must believe me.
He's ill.
Chris is ill.
>> Chris.
>> I knew him, it's a very long time ago, but he was a friend of the family.
>> Holding a telegram written to her by Chris, she tells Kitty and Chris's cousin
Jenny, that Chris has returned to England and is lying ill in a hospital ward.
>> Please believe me, he's ill.
You forget that if anything had happened to my husband,
the war office would have informed me.
Now please go before I call the police.
>> Please read this.
It's a telegram from Captain Baldry.
It's addressed to Margaret Allington, that was my maiden name, and
I've been married for ten years.
Shocked by the news and the person who brought it, Kitty and Jenny set forth for
London only to find that Chris recognizes Jenny,
a cousin he knew growing up, but not his wife Kitty.
>> Chris.
>> Jenny.
>> Chris.
>> Jenny. [INAUDIBLE]
>> Chris.
>> [INAUDIBLE] >> Mrs.
Gray sent us a telegram.
>> Thank God you're safe.
>> What's happening?
What's happening?
>> What's the matter?
>> [INAUDIBLE] >> Believing that he is still a young man,
Chris sent the telegram to Margaret, trying to rekindle their former romance.
>> [SOUND] It's a shell shock.
Often affects people like this.
>> Chris, don't you know me?
I am your wife.
>> Why.
Go away.
Take her away. Go away.
Go away I haven't got a wife.
>> The house seems different.
>> We had these stairs restored a couple of years ago.
Don't you remember all the mess?
>> No, I must have forgotten.
>> Back home, Chris recognizes his house and
surrounding estate, but there is a 20-year gap in his mind.
Looking in a mirror is startling he says, seeing an older man staring back.
[MUSIC]
>> You'll find he's much changed.
>> I should know it.
>> Reluctant to accept his condition, his wife Kitty arranges for
Margaret to visit him,
hoping that seeing her as a middle-aged woman will shock Chris out of his amnesia.
[MUSIC]
Watching their meeting from afar,
Kitty seethes as the former lovers embrace.
>> In a minute, he’ll see her face.
[MUSIC]
[SOUND] >> If you can't remember her at all.
>> Later, speaking to his doctor, Chris admits that his wife seems familiar,
but adds.
>> I know her as if one knows a woman who is staying in the same hotel.
>> Why should it distress him so much to have his memory restored?
>> Because of the boy of course, his boy.
>> What boy?
>> His son.
>> [NOISE] Determined to restore Chris' memory,
even if it means returning him to war, Kitty tells Margaret how they
lost their two-year-old son to illness five years ago.
>> That doctor was right.
>> You can't shut out pain like this and pretend it never happened.
That's not happiness, it's make believe.
[MUSIC]
>> When Margaret relays the story to Chris,
he falters briefly before turning away,
>> Is he coming back?
>> and marching back to a smiling Kitty.
His memories of war and his son have returned.
>> Yes, he's coming back.
>> I'll continue this coverage of functional amnesia in the next lecture
by focusing on dissociative fugue and dissociative identity disorder.
[MUSIC]
