ABSTRACT
In their fresh and inventive book, Star Trek on the Brain, Sekuler and Blake (1998) masterfully transform the popular television series Star Trek to teach invaluable lessons about human memory, intelligence, creativity, emotions, and other cognitive functions. Star Trek’s complex universe of aliens and alien cultures includes one called Simon Van Gelder, who at one point worked on a penal colony. To his dismay, he finds his memory has been “erased, edited, adjusted” by a favorite device used in the colony— a neural neutralizer. Once applied, Van Gelder suffers from retrograde amnesia and can’t explain to his inquisitors what happened to him after he escaped from the colony. Retrograde amnesia has, of course, been of great interest to neuroscientists who work with brain injured patients, as in the example of the patient ML, a successful salesperson who was severely injured when he was struck by a car while cycling (Levine et al, 1998). Van Gelder’s retrograde amnesia, as is the case in some individuals, was produced not by severe traumatic brain injury, but by some other process.
