Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

How happy is the blameless vestal's lot!
The world forgetting, by the world forgot.
Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind!
Each pray'r accepted, and each wish resign'd
-Alexander Pope, Eloisa to Abelard

Because of recent events, certain images keep percolating in my mind. Searing memories which seem to taunt me. They dare me to think about them, to get caught up in them, to relish or hate them. As the specter of Communism hung over Europe, so does this aching past. Words, people, places, and events, all things which can cause these images to coagulate. Afterwards, I'll think, "Why do you do this to yourself? Those past events have no current bearing on your life. Why can't you let go? Why can't you be rid of these images which cause such a negative reaction in you?" I really don't know the answer to this. It's hard for me to understand how I can cherish something but at the same time revile its existence. How one moment I spit in anger, but the next I think back longingly. It sometimes makes me wonder if I wouldn't be better off not remembering any of it all. Throw it away to the dark backwards and abysm of time and pretend like it never happened. A recent article in Wired magazine proposed this very question: "If there were a pill which could erase bad memories, would you take it?" Another news story by Linda Carroll reports that neuroscientists are researching such a pill that when taken can sequester a memory and erase it by restricting the stress-hormone cortisol, like pressing a button on a computer.

Tales of soldiers coming home from war suffering from Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) are repeated across news agencies, mainstream and alternative. There is a certain terror we feel in a vet gone wrong. Has killing become second nature to him? PubMed Health gives a solid definition of what's going on in PTSD victims: "PTSD is a potentially debilitating anxiety disorder triggered by exposure to a traumatic experience such as an interpersonal event like physical or sexual assault, exposure to disaster or accidents, combat or witnessing a traumatic event. There are three main clusters of symptoms: firstly, those related to re‐experiencing the event; secondly, those related to avoidance and arousal; and thirdly, the distress and impairment caused by the first two symptom clusters." A few years ago, I watched an American remake dealing with this disorder titled "Brothers". If anyone doubts Tobey Maguire's acting skills, just watch this; it is a truly nerve-wracking spectacle. Stories of improper diagnosis and lack of aid to sufferers are telling of America's modern way of life. However, In Wired's piece, a relatively new way of helping victims is described. Jeffrey Mitchell, a volunteer fire fighter who also suffered from a version of PTSD, invented the CISD method (critical incident stress debriefing) in 2001. It focuses on bringing the emotions involved with the experience out early before the person tries to suppress them and the anxiety gets worse. Essentially, it is like ripping a band-aid off quickly. According to the article, this method of handling PTSD has increased in use and popularity, with more than "30,000 people" being "train[ed] in the technique" each year. The only problem? It doesn't work.

Follow-up studies have shown that the process of CISD makes the future anxiety in victims greater. The writer of the article, Jonah Lehrer, doesn't blame Mitchell, relating that "since the time of the ancient Greeks, people have imagined memories to be a stable form of information that persists reliably. The metaphors for this persistence have changed over time—Plato compared our recollections to impressions in a wax tablet, and the idea of a biological hard drive is popular today—but the basic model has not. Once a memory is formed, we assume that it will stay the same. This, in fact, is why we trust our recollections. They feel like indelible portraits of the past." Like I related above and will get into deeper below, the memories which we choose to keep are images which we put into an overall narrative--how we construct the story of our life is in fact more important than what the actual individual recollections are. A great event may not have been so great if it hadn't ended with your first kiss. A terrible even may not have been so terrible had it not ended in spraining your ankle and limping the rest of the way home. Memories are fluid, they change because, in the end, they are part of our present. Everything, even you remembering the past, is in the eternal 'now'. Lehrer says our faith in our own memories are misguided. They are not unbending to the rules of the present ego, they are not "packets of data" which "remain constant. Even though every memory feels like an honest representation, that sense of authenticity is the biggest lie of all." He says that remembering actually changes the memory itself. Thus, CISD fails because "pushing to remember a traumatic event so soon after it occurs doesn't unburden us; it reinforces the fear and stress that are part of the recollection."





To get in the mood of the piece, I decided to re-watch one of my early college favorites, "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind." After a breakup, the spontaneous Clementine decides to erase her ex from her past using a new technology which does just that. Joel, in his anguish, decides to have the procedure done too, but in the above video, decides he doesn't want to forget her after all. The truly heart-breaking scene I couldn't find on Youtube is of a young Joel being forced to hit a dead bird with a hammer. As he huddles over its carcass in a red wagon, he brings Clementine to this old memory and wishes that he knew her as a kid. The tragic thing is that this is Joel's perception of her. This only happened inside his head.

A dichotomy is being set up: our memories make us who we are but living in them can stifle our growth.

In an earlier scene, Joel, upon learning that Clementine has deleted him from her memory, cannot move forward. He is so hung up on the past that he spends his days and nights thinking about what he could have done differently. He lingers in his friends' home, and when he is by himself, he lashes out, slamming his fists into the steering wheel. As Alan Watts related, living in the past is akin to death. They are images without corruption, either being completely black or white. That is how we remember. We don't think of the intricacies of the situation, except sometimes making excuses for how we acted or ranting about the other person. People, places, things become complete abstractions. It is similar to war time when soldiers fire on the propagandized enemy without considering his humanity. Thinking back on my own experiences from last semester, I tried to elevate myself above it so I could live with myself afterward. I tried to construct a narrative where I was still the hero. This is necessary. In Joel's case, he quickly decides to erase Clementine from his past in retaliation. He races to the doctor's office and demands for the process to be started. The doctor, knowing his pain, says yes. The question begs later on in the movie, if neither person remembers the event happening, did it ever take place? All we have is memories, and when they are gone, well, that's sort of a terrifying prospect isn't it?

According to Jonah Lehrer, "neuroscientists actually have a molecular explanation of how and why memories change. In fact, their definition of memory has broadened to encompass not only the cliché cinematic scenes from childhood but also the persisting mental loops of illnesses like PTSD and addiction—and even pain disorders like neuropathy." Science can now tell us the individual chemicals which go into the process of creating a memory, and as a result, Lehrer dramatically proclaims, "in the very near future, the act of remembering will become a choice." Our brains contain a vast network of linkages--the more we use certain linkages, the easier the associations between different images become. "If one cell fires," Lehrer says, "the rest of the circuit lights up as well. Scientists refer to this process as long-term potentiation, and it involves an intricate cascade of gene activations and protein synthesis that make it easier for these neurons to pass along their electrical excitement." As a memory becomes engrained into the architecture of our mind, neurons will grow more and more linkages. In other words, the canals are dug deeper, and our most observed memories become literally written into the fabric of our consciousness. Proteins are required in the growth of these channels, however, and if certain amino acids are blocked during the process, the memory itself can be erased. This idea is an interesting one and also tells us something else: "memories are not formed and then pristinely maintained, as neuroscientists thought; they are formed and then rebuilt every time they're accessed." The memory is thus more like a play than a movie, changing each time we experience it.

A study done after September 11th found that people's recollections of the events which happened that day are slowly changing as history progresses. "At one year out, 37 percent of the details had changed" Lehrer says, and "by 2004 that number was approaching 50 percent." During my interview with Logan Garcia, he informed me that under hypnosis a person can be made to forget a certain memory or even remember one which did not exist before. Our pasts are mist and gain meaning only when we interpret them as such. It is easy to change someone's recollection because the memory is influenced by narrative. Shlain relates in his book, The Alphabet Versus the Goddess, that time in oral cultures is perceived less linearly. Because we have been influenced by the written word, we have begun to see history as set in stone, free from interpretations and bearing only the facts. The ego has informed us of the importance of cause, materiality, and time. However, our perceptions of these things can be skewed, with animals potentially experiencing the universe at different speeds. The video below always reminds me of the shortness of our lives--how the universe can be starting and ending in the same exact moment, and it is only the way we perceive time which hides this fact to us:



In this moment, you are being born and are dying at the same time.

In the court of law, eye witness reports are not taken seriously because memory is always in flux, always rewriting itself each time we pass through it. This fact should not be surprising to us--memory is imagination. Lehrer says that when a memory is recorded it is done in two ways: one is the visual (which is kept all over the brain because of the different senses involved) and the other is emotional (amygdala). By opening a memory up early, CISD patients can become more traumatized than if they had waited because it was while they were still in a phase of high emotional duress, affecting the eventual recollection which would be recorded. On the other hand, when PTSD sufferers were given ecstasy when they discussed the distressing events, they were calm, altering their potential memories for the better. Lehrer says "83 percent of the [ecstasy] patients showed a dramatic decrease in symptoms within two months. That makes ecstasy one of the most effective PTSD treatments devised." Other drugs being studied include propranolol, which inhibits norepinephrine. A study showed that sufferers of PTSD fared better under the drug because it prevented strong emotions from being created in the amygdala.

It is the protein PKMzeta which may be the key to eliminating specific memories however. Its "crucial trick is that it increases the density of a particular type of sensor called an AMPA receptor on the outside of a neuron. It’s an ion channel, a gateway to the interior of a cell that, when opened, makes it easier for adjacent cells to excite one another." Interestingly, by genetically modifying a rat to have more PKMzeta, it causes them to become "mnemonic freaks, able to convert even the most mundane events into long-term memory." If a drug were invented which you could use to erase a bad memory would you take it? Would you be fearless enough to rip pages you didn't like out of the book? "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" suggests that if we forget the past we are doomed to repeat the same mistakes. In the videos below we see Joel's last vision of Clementine being erased. She whispers into his ear, "meet me in Montauk," the place they first met and the place she still heads to without knowing why. Joel ends up following his unconscious and they do see each other again. There is something between them already which neither can put their finger on. They seem to complete each other. The second video deals with the last chronological scene in the movie, when they figure out they have been in a relationship before.





Lehrer says something similar: "The problem with eliminating pain, of course, is that pain is often educational. We learn from our regrets and mistakes; wisdom is not free. If our past becomes a playlist—a collection of tracks we can edit with ease—then how will we resist the temptation to erase the unpleasant ones? Even more troubling, it’s easy to imagine a world where people don’t get to decide the fate of their own memories." We evolved the perfect memory, one which allows us to grow from our mistakes but not remember so much as to stagnant our growth. By altering this balance, we risk our humanity. As for myself, I would not give up the past. The other day I was talking to a close friend and he told me, not verbatim, that he tries to remember the good things as to not resent the bad ones. It's hard being pissed off about what happened all the time, but growth is important in our narratives--there are always new goals to reach and new mountains to climb. By deleting the bad events, we lose this momentum. Even if we could be as children again, as Socrates promotes, we would lose the significance of it. Our society also risks falling into Aldous Huxley's A Brave New World, especially if this drug ended up in the wrong hands. I fear it, and personally, I would refuse to take it.