ABSTRACT
Memory helps define who we are as human beings and as individuals. It contributes to our notion of self and our sense of continuity in daily life and in the world. The fascination with memory is pervasive, for example, in the arts: painting, literature, and movies. Salvador Dali’s Persistence of Memory (aka The soft watches) painted in 1931 and Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory painted 20 years later are two works exploring the notion of the subjectivity of recollection and the dissolution of memory traces over time. One Hundred Years of Solitude, the novel by Nobel Prize winner Gabriel García Márquez, published in 1967, follows the Buendia family over several generations. The author describes one incident that underlies the importance of sleep in the formation and maintenance of memories. For reasons unknown, all the residents of the town where the Buendia family reside develop insomnia. This episode is followed by a progressive amnesia in which the inhabitants slowly begin to lose the names of objects and animals and their purpose. To fight this disorder, the villagers begin attaching labels to every object, plant, and animal stating its name and function or role: “This is the cow. She must be milked every morning.” Later on, just as mysteriously, the insomnia and the amnesia dissipate. Another particularly poignant book is John Bayley’s meticulous account of the slow and devastating effect of Alzheimer’s disease on memory, and the progressive mental disintegration of his wife, the writer Iris Murdoch (Bayley, 1999). Movies have also explored memory, as in Citizen Kane, in which the magnate’s last word on his deathbed, “Rosebud”, alluded to a powerful childhood memory. More recent examples are Memento, The Bourne Supremacy, and Minority Report, in
which central characters face adversity and succeed despite severe memory disturbances.
