The mind behind me

摘要

In the film Memento, the main character, Leonard Shelby, suffers an injury to the head that creates a nightmarish problem. Although his experiences before the injury are clear, everything that has happened after it is unfamiliar, even events that occurred just moments before. Because the mind's recording device is broken, things are experienced but never recalled. Shelby's autobiography is frozen in the past. It is hard for us to imagine what it would be like to lack this kind of memory. It would certainly rob us of one component of our sense of self, of what it was like to have experienced different things in the world. We would not be able to judge whether or not we like something; we would have to resample each event on the moment. Even if we resorted to writing down each experience, as Shelby tried to do, we would be constrained by the relatively impoverished connection between subjective experience and language.