Archived Discussion Main / LaserGuidedAmnesia

This is discussion archived from a time before the current discussion method was installed.

Red Shoe: I find myself wanting to talk a little about the way amnesia tends to work in TV — the way it tends to affect only memories of one's identity and, particularly, the way that, in a Plausible Deniability series, it tends to affect exactly the "special knowledge" of the character. I had a look at Easy Amnesia, but I think it'll overbalance the article away from where it was originally meant to go. Got a good name for me?

Dark Sasami: All I'm coming up with is [[Fuggedaboudit]]

Ununnilium: Laser-Guided Amnesia?

Red Shoe: Works for me. As they say, Inspiration Powers, Go!

Ununnilium: Neat! Moving it over.

Is the page referring to that amnesiac piano player in Britain, a few years ago? Wasn't that guy German who faked his amnesia?

It certainly looks like it's referring to him, and the consensus seems to be it was faked. I'll remove it. —Many Hills It read: "[...]; the most severe case of amnesia on record, a man who has no past memory and no ability to lay down new memories, can still play the piano beautifully."

• Used rather well during the events of The Legend Of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. The game is three-fourths over before either Link or the player finds out that Sheik is actually an extremely well disguised Princess Zelda, concealed inside a male body and subjected to a rather specialized form of magical amnesia. When she gets her regular body back, she also gets her memories back.

There is no evidence ANYWHERE in the game or related material that Sheik did not know her true identity at any point in time. —Heroic Jay

Rachel: I don't believe in a case of amnesia where someone lost all of their past memories and the ability to add new memories (that would involve two very different forms of damage happening to the same person) and could still play the piano beautifully (as they likely would have huge amounts of overall brain damage). A cite would be good. What actually has happened is the destruction of the ability to create new memories (the most common form of real life amnesia without adding in complications like dementia). This happened to a college student during a fencing accident that managed to destroy the bit of the brain that allows the working or short term memories to be stored into long term memories. He could still follow what was going on, until he had something distract him and he lost his thought. He could watch a movie, but he couldn't watch television as the commercials made him lose the story. Memento is actually fairly realistic for this problem until the end when they mess it all up. Anyhow, what was striking was that while he absolutely could not form new long term memories, he could learn new processes because procedural memory is apparently a different process (as the page claims, but with a rather unlikely example). They had him learn to solve a Rubik's cube, a toy that didn't exist when his accident happened. He got very fast and very good at solving a Rubik's cube, but he never remembered what a Rubik's Cube was. They had to tell him every time they introduced it to him what it was. It is particularly interesting, to me at least, that a Rubik's cube can be learned through procedural memory as I would have expected more cognitive aspects involved. Or perhaps there are other forms of learning that also can happen without the ability to remember the incidents of one's life.

Harley Quinn hyenaholic: I had to remove the Transformers reference. It IS explained why it doesn't knock out Ratchet - because it was built for him. Not a very GOOD because, but not that bad seeing as he's a robot. Also, it IS fairly obvious why Lockdown didn't get wiped - it wasn't pointed directly at his head. And as for Arcee, it was fairly apparent that all her memories were wiped when she asked who she was and where she was in a kind of drone - though it's not clear that they'll stick to this if she's ever brought back. Not entirely accurate, maybe, but it was better than most of the examples on this page.

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Would it be appropriate to add "Total Recall" here? Quaid's amnesia was induced intentionally, but he didn't have any idea who he was while retaining his motor skills. Remember how he thrashed the bad guys after visiting Recall, Inc.? Or would that visit to Recall count as nullifying the amnesia? Or, while still amnesiac—sorta—his handwriting didn't change (when he wrote "Melina" on a sheet of paper at the hotel on Mars.) —Clue Deficiency Disorder

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Cut this and replaced it with a brief mention that repressed memories are controversial:

• Though to be fair, some people think this is junk science.
  • "Some people" in this case being "scientists". There is overwhelming consensus on this point, except among screen-writers.
  • At the risk of introducing a troper tale into a tvtrope, I'm going to have to trot out personal experience by way of contradicting these alleged scientists. When I was six years old, my older sister was killed by a drunk driver while the family was on vacation. I have vivid, detailed (and corroborated by other family members) memories of earlier incidents; I even clearly remember the horror of seeing my mother slam the car door on her hand, nearly breaking her fingers, the day before my sister was killed. Although we were very close and I had her wrapped around my cute little finger, I don't remember ever knowing her. I can't tell you what she looked like (apart from pictures I have seen since then), or what she sounded like, or what we did together. Over 40 years later, I still have trouble forming long-term memories, particularly of traumatic incidents (which means a large part of my childhood and adolescence is missing). The only time that pesky subconscious intrudes is when something very similar to the event occurs - I broke down in hysterics watching the moving "Swing Kids" with my wife when the young boy watches with confusion as his older brother is put on a train and herded off to a death camp, because he was losing his beloved older sibling and had no idea that it was forever or why it was happening. And don't get me started about how I would freak out at the sight of so much as a drop of blood until I was 10 or so. On the plus side, it's very easy to forgive and forget when I can't remember being hurt.