The Neural Basis of Watching "Memento"

Memento (2000) is a complex psychological thriller about a man unable to form long-term memories. The movie is popular among neuroscientists for its accurate depiction of amnesia. Now, in a wonderfully "meta" paper, a group of neuroscientists report that they scanned the brains of people watching Memento in order to study memory processes. The paper's called Brain mechanisms underlying cue-based memorizing during free viewing of movie Memento, and it's published in Neuroimage, from Finnish researchers Janne Kauttonen and colleagues. Kauttonen et al. showed n=13 adults the full version of Memento during fMRI scanning. The participants had never seen the movie before. The authors' focus was on 15 "key-events", distinctive scenes in the movie which are each shown twice. These key-events are key to understanding Memento because the movie is told out of the normal chronological order: when a key scene is shown for the second time, it helps the viewer ...