Towards a manipulation of memory by science?: a contextualized analysis of the films Final Cut and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

Towards a manipulation of memory by science?: a contextualized analysis of the films Final Cut and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind Carlos Alberto de Matos Trindade, Ph.D. Escola Superior Artística do Porto (ESAP), Porto, Portugal carlos.trind[email protected] Abstract. In this article, after a general introduction about a brain prosthesis project - a substitute for the hippocampus -, started in 2003 by a team of neuroscientists from the University of Southern California, and experiments started between 2007 and 2009 by scientists of various nationalities, we present in more detail some of the main results of the latter, published in scientific articles, which allow us to predict some potential risks in the future, and pose ethical problems, for worthy intentions that scientists may have. Following this, we discuss films Final Cut (2004) by Omar Naїm and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), directed by Michel Gondry, which present multiple points of contact with the aforementioned scientific projects, anticipating some of the foreseeable dangers, and allow us to discuss the future possibility of a manipulation of memory (and of oblivion), through science. Although they are fiction films, much of what is shown in both is compatible (except for some aspects) with real neuroscience research projects that are currently underway. Keywords. Chips, Scientific experiments, Memory manipulation, Oblivion, Emotion. 1. Introduction As Simone do Vale pointed out in 2005 (that is, in the year following the premiere of the films we are about to analyze), it’s curious to verify (…) that the first project of brain prosthesis being developed is, exactly, an electronic substitute for the hippocampus, the region of the brain whose function is to store memory and durable information. (Vale, 2005: 7) The aforementioned prosthesis project, the only one of its kind still in progress, as far as we know, was initiated in 2003 by a team of neuroscientists from the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, headed by Theodore Berger, who developed an artificial hippocampus - a neural implant - with the aim of helping in the future people affected by dementias – Alzheimer`s disease and others – by delaying the deterioration of the memory caused by them. Starting from the conception of a working model of the hippocampus, based on the observation of the information processing patterns of the real, the team built a model on an electronic silicone chip, designed to serve as a kind of interface in the brain, replacing the 654 Technium Social Sciences Journal Vol. 19, 654-667, May, 2021 ISSN: 2668-7798 www.techniumscience.com tissue deteriorated as a result of the loss of cells: the chip would couple to the hippocampus and communicate with the brain through two types of electrodes 1 , located on either side of the area affected by the neurodegeneration. One side of the chip records the electrical activity received from the rest of the brain, while the other has the function of sending the relevant electrical instructions to the brain. Meanwhile, during the years 2007 to 2009 results of experiments carried out by teams of Israeli, American, Canadian and Brazilian researchers have been published, which allow us to foresee that something that until a few years ago still seemed to belong, and only, to the domain of fantasy and science fiction – as we have seen in films such as Total Recall (1990) and Minority Report (2002), directed respectively by Paul Verhoven and Steven Spielberg from the short stories We Can Remember It for You Wholesale (1966) and Minority Report (1956) by the American science fiction writer Philip K. Dick, an author in whom the theme of memory is recurrent; or Michael Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotlesss Mind (2004) – may become a reality in the not too distant future: the manipulation of human memory, and oblivion, by science. Manipulation that will not be done through digital technology, as prophesied by the filmic fantasies cited, among others, but thanks to the remarkable progress achieved in recent years by biology and neurosciences in understanding the unfathomable mysteries of brain functioning. If, for now, as far as we know, all the experiments in laboratory to which we are going to refer were carried out with the brains of guinea-pig rats, they open anyway important perspectives also in relation to the human brain, for which applications derived from the acquired knowledge are already foreseen, and to be developed, especially in the treatment of its dysfunctions. Before we go on to enunciate some of the data made public, and published, about the said researches, we can't fail to note, however, that if the scientists' discoveries have certainly meritorious intentions, they also potentially contain some dangers – if they are used for unethical purposes, which unfortunately would not be unprecedented –, demanding some caution and control. These discoveries open the way to the subsequent possibility, as you will easily notice, of implanting false memories. 2. Towards a manipulation of memory? In July 2007, in an article published in the Journal of Pshychiatric Research, a team of American and Canadian scientists announced that they used drug propanolol to block memories considered undesirable.The results were not yet conclusive at the time, but they expressed the hope that the research undertaken could lead to the discovery of new treatments for those patients with psychiatric problems, such as those caused by post-traumatic stress. 2 Earlier, in May 2007, Israeli neuroscientists Itay Baruchi and Eshel Ben-Jacob, from TelAviv University and University of California at San Diego (La Jolla), published an article in the journal Physical Review E, where they present the results of a pioneering experiment they carried out in cultured neural networks, of living neurons, interfaced with a computer. According to these authors, they proved the possibility of storing information in the activity of these cultured neural networks, as they found memory patterns in it, even after more than 40 hours had elapsed after inducing them, using local chemical stimulations, through the injection of microdroplets of inhibitory antagonist. The discovery, in addition to taking a step 1 To view an image of the tiny chip designed by the team of neuroscientists at the University of Southern California, cf. Rita Carter, et al. (2009: 159). 2 Cf. Ferraz (2008: 36-37). 655 Technium Social Sciences Journal Vol. 19, 654-667, May, 2021 ISSN: 2668-7798 www.techniumscience.com forward in understanding the learning mechanisms in living organisms, opens up future perspectives for the development of neuronal networks, which allows us to think of a hypothetical technology to create chips built with integrated organic matter 3 . In 2008, according to Maria Cristina Franco Ferraz, [...] on the BBC Brazil website, dated March 27, 2008, a research was released (...) carried out by the University of California and recently published in the scientific journal «Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences». According to this research, which has been vulgarized and synthesized in the journalistic website, the use of the inhaled anesthetic Sevoflurane, in reduced doses, would be able to block the formation of negative memories. At the end of the subject matter, we read that what is considered (even) more complicated is to manipulate old memories. The research projects are then advancing and gradually expanding their (provisional) limits. (Ferraz, 2008: 35-36) 4 Already in 2009, a team of researchers from the University of California, at Santa Barbara, dedicated to studying the role of certain protein molecules in neural cells, such as MOV10 (inhibitor of the production of other proteins that strengthen synapses) – indeed, based on research by the Portuguese scientist Rosalina Fonseca –, has come to the conclusion that the degradation and production of these molecules plays a key role in the storage in neurons of so-called long-term memory. More important, they verified that this activity of producing and destroying proteins inside the nervous cells not only produced new memories (because, if the inhibiting molecules are degraded, the neuron produces proteins that strengthen the synapses) but, at the same time, it altered those already existing. 5 Other specialists have dedicated themselves to studying the possibilities of what we may call selective amnesia. A team at the SUNY Downstate Medical Center in New York, led by neuroscientist Todd C. Sacktor, was able to develop a method that allows to remove memories from the brain long after they were stored there. The method consisted in blocking the action of a specific protein in the brain of Sprague-Dawley rats - by manipulating the enzyme PKMzeta, a kinase that ensures electrical signals between neurons -, in order to successfully erase memories that had been constituted a few months before 6 . Also Joe Tsien, at the Medical College of Georgia, has been manipulating CaMKII kinase, wich is necessary for the learning process, with the same purpose. In turn, a group of researchers from the Memory Center of the Pontifical Catholic University (PUC) of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, coordinated by Argentine neurophysiologist Martín Cammarota, carried out laboratory experiments that provided new contributions. Through the use of a drug inhibiting the action of the neurotransmitter dopamine in the hippocampus brain area, a specialized area essentially responsible for long-term memory formation, researchers were able to eliminate specific memories of the rats, before they reached their stable and “permanent” state. The same group from PUC also made another important discovery: an area adjacent to the hippocampus, if activated 12 hours after an experiment, triggers the beginning of the 3 On the pioneer experience, vd. Baruchi, I. & Ben-Jacob, E. (2007). 4 For further information about the results of the survey mentioned by Maria Cristina Franco Ferraz, see Michael T. Alkire, et al. (2008). It is a scientific article with a technical jargon very “heavy”; that it is why we opted to use in this article a short quote, second-hand information, which captures the essential of the results. 5 About the research carried out by the team of researchers at the University of California, at Santa Barbara, see Schelp & Simões (2010: 116-117), and Banerjee, Sourav, Neveu, Pierre & Kosik, Kenneth S. (2009: 871-884). 6 Cf. Schelp & Simões (2010: 125). 656 Technium Social Sciences Journal Vol. 19, 654-667, May, 2021 ISSN: 2668-7798 www.techniumscience.com process that will culminate in the preservation of that memory. Although the experiment was carried out with laboratory rats – the results of which have been published in the journal Science –, the researchers admit the possibility that also in the human brain there is a time interval, of a few hours) until the perception of any fact is processed as a lasting mnesic trace (or “engram”). It would then be possible, during this time interval, to artificially modify the memory, either to strengthen it or to prevent it, which opens the door to some interesting perspectives from the clinical point of view 7 . There remained, however, a dangerous ‘downside’ to take into account, in our view, and one that poses a challenge for scientists to solve: whether the discovery might lead to useful therapeutic applications, such as the creation of drugs to combat forgetfulness (and thus improve memory capacity) or narcotics use and dependence, or even “in the future, in theory, a rape victim may take a pill a few hours after the violence she suffered, in order to avoid the permanence of that traumatic memory.” (Schelp & Simões, 2010: 124), on the other hand, one can also incur the serious inconvenience of causing the absolute forgetfulness of everything that happened in the life of the medicated person for at least half a day, equally erasing memories that the person would wish, or would have every interest, to preserve. 3. Final Cut by Omar Naїm We start by mentioning some scientific experiments, and in development, that raise some ethical problems for us, and we will now proceed to an analysis of the films. Without being a masterpiece, the film Final Cut (2004) by American filmmaker Omar Naïm has an interesting script, in which the potential dangers of interfaces between computers and humans are focused, whereby in the not too distant future the technology will allow the placement of internal implants in the human brain. The question that arises is to what extent this step will not represent a technological violation of privacy, and yet another abuse of the memory that is announced, using an expression by Paul Ricoeur (2003: 67-111): the chips are a metaphor for the postmodern condition, but they also point to a potentially dangerous practice; there is always the risk of being misapplied, and the problem arises of who ‘controls’ 8 . In Final Cut, the company Eich Tech produces entirely organic implants (the ninth generation of a scientific discovery), the Zoe chips, which are placed in the brains of human embryos, and which are prepared to grow with the brain and nerve centers of the baby, recording the life of its possessor through his eyes and ears, until his death: all its experiences will thus be preserved. What the company announces is an old human aspiration: the dream of reaching "immortality". According to Eich Tech, a Zoe image lasts forever, and thus becomes available to be enjoyed by loved ones, by future generations of the relatives of the one who possessed it, preserving the supposedly most important moments of his life. Implanted in the brain and virtually impossible to detect, Zoe chips record the memory of a whole lifetime. But after the chip owner's death, his family can claim it from the company, and hand it over to Editors to edit ii as a kind of 'home movie', to be shown at his funeral. They, in line with their clients' wishes, make all kinds of cuts and montages in a lifetime, shortening it and creating an edifying vision, in line with what the community wants, and people then actually attend a 'Re-memory' ceremony. So one point that the film clearly raises from the beginning regarding implants is that, from the moment they are extracted everything 7 Cf. Schelp & Simões (2010, 124-125). 8 The film Johnny Mnemonic (1995) directed by the American artist Robert Longo, which we will not discuss here, dealt with the issue of implanting chips in the human brain. In fact, the main character is an authentic human hard drive. 657 Technium Social Sciences Journal Vol. 19, 654-667, May, 2021 ISSN: 2668-7798 www.techniumscience.com we have done and lived through will only last if our family so desires; ultimately, people will be able to see us in whatever way our family wants us to be seen, and that may be quite distinct from the way we would like to be seen, and remembered. On the limit, not even that, because there will be little left of us and of true experiences, and the whole that constitutes the unity and essence of a being will be the result of a choice in the hands of any ‘Editor’. The main character of the film is Alan W. Hakman (played by Robin Williams), a meticulous editor at Eich Tech, reserved and with a manifest difficulty in relating to other people. Alan is a different Editor from the others, who has a different editing method from his colleagues and accepts projects that they refuse. In fact, he does very questionable things, like omitting information from inconvenient memories, manipulating the images of their lives. We learned during the film that due to an incident that goes back to his childhood he has a mechanism of distance, which allowed him to specialize in enduring seeing what others can't, or aren't willing to. This mechanism then allows him to face with a certain coldness all the reprehensible acts that a person has done, and then, with a simple touch on the delete, those acts (unwanted or ‘sensitive’ files) disappear. As he says at one point, "my job is to help people remember what they want". In conflict with himself for a long time due to his past, Alan seeks to forgive others because he believes that they need a redemption after death, even if it means changing what was their life. In an illustrative scene, his girlfriend Delila (played by Mira Sovino) commenting on his work tells him: "You're like a mortician, or a priest; or a taxidermist; all of them". For his part, Alan invokes for his procedure an ancient tradition of religious magic - a common practice, for example, in villages in England, Scotland and Wales (where it may have survived, some studies say, until the end of the 19th century) - in which was called the ‘sineater’ when someone died, usually a beggar, to through ritual means, involving food and drink, carry the burden of the deceased's sins. Alan will be hired by the widow of C. Banister, an important lawyer at Eich Tech, after a colleague refuses the request. And soon in a first encounter of Alan with the widow, we became aware of his position: he is there so that her and her daughter help him choose the moments they want to preserve, in order to do ‘justice’ to her husband; a step that considers the basis for his work. And it's no accident that she tells Allan during this encounter that she trusts his professionalism, unlike that of other ‘negligent’ editors who have no respect for the dead. Figure 1. Final Cut (2004). Alan working on 'Guillotine'. Source: https://machinesaredigging.com/2012/06/28/movie-review-the-final-cut/ 658 Technium Social Sciences Journal Vol. 19, 654-667, May, 2021 ISSN: 2668-7798 www.techniumscience.com In one of the key scenes of the film, we see Alan working with the sophisticated machine he and the other editors of the company use - "film editing table" type -, appropriately named "Guillotine" [figure 1], receiving (and putting in order) Bannister’s experiences: in reality a life file archive, properly organized according to entries with titles as diverse as "childhood", "school", "sleep", "violence", "personal hygiene", "tragedies", "religion", "masturbation", "romantic life", "marriage", "temptations", among others. And it is by going through and opening these files, to edit the memories of the deceased, that Alan will find images of an obscure corner of his life: they prove that he raped his underage daughter Isabel. Alan is not a bad person, as you can see in the difficult conversation he will end up having with Isabel [figure 2]. Faced with the girl's reluctance to talk openly about her father, Alan carefully eludes the traumatic episode, but leaves her a message in the last dialogue before leaving: Will you fix the things that Daddy can remember? (Isabel asks). To a certain extent I will (answers Alan). Can you make him forget that I drew a crayon in a contract with him? (Isabel asks). I will. He will forget; but make sure you don't. (answers Alan). Figure 2. Final Cut (2004). Alan talking to Isabel. Source: www.sensacine.com/peliculas/pelicula-52423/fotos/detalle/?cmediafile=18394695 By a casual coincidence, when going through these files of another person's life Alan finds images - of a former Isabel’s teacher, we learn during the conversation with the girl – that they reveal the crucial event of his own life [figure 3], the one that has been chasing him since childhood and has shaped his personality, originating the mechanism of detachment already mentioned by us. As Alan comes to discover, as he tries to unlock (his) secret and questions his identity, the child he came to know on a day far from his childhood, and thought he had killed, survived after all: what he thought he saw during his childhood incident when he was ten years old - the supposed death of the child, caused by a fall during a dangerous game in an abandoned shed, of which he blamed himself for having abandoned her on the spot without trying to help her, as he thought - was in reality an illusory perception, which often happens. The definitive proof of his illusory perception is provided, with the help of two friendly editors, after discovering that he himself has an Eich Tech implant, commissioned by his parents without him ever having known. Through a dangerous experience, for being made 'in 659 Technium Social Sciences Journal Vol. 19, 654-667, May, 2021 ISSN: 2668-7798 www.techniumscience.com life', he will visualize that desired remote memory - Alan needs to see, because that is how he records all things, used to being a voyeur of the lives of others - to reach the conclusion that he had after all confused in his memory the red ink spilled from a can, with a stain of blood on the ground next to his companion's body. This confusion reminds the viewer of something Alan had previously said to his girlfriend when, in another scene, he showed her on the Guillotine the functioning of the Zoe chips, with images of herself, half real, half dreamlike: "There are defective implants, they cannot differentiate between what the eyes and the mind see". Figure 3. Final Cut (2004). Alan visualizes the desired remote memories. Source: http://www.sensacine.com/peliculas/pelicula-52423/fotos/detalle/?cmediafile=18857076 However, Alan will be confronted by Fletcher, a former editor who went on to lead antiimplant gro ups Zoe - we see them demonstrating right at the beginning of the film [figure 4], at the entrance of a Re-Memory ceremony, displaying posters with phrases like 'live for the present' - and suspecting Bannister's life, he wants to take over the respective implant, and tells him during a meeting with him, explaining the reasons for his combat: "Implants distort memories, and therefore History, and I don't let the past be rewritten, in the name of nice rememories”. The shadow of G. Orwell's dark vision of a Big Brother runs through the whole film, along with the idea that we are 'walking cameras' in a progressively more voyeuristic society, since we are surrounded by cameras everywhere, wherever we go 9 . 9 On Orwell's prophecy, and an assessment of the various facets of the direct impact of new information technologies, vd. Manuel Castells (2007: 404-408), who concludes: "Reports on the growing threat to privacy concern less the State as such than business organizations and private information networks or public bureaucratic apparatuses that follow their own logic instead of acting on behalf of the government". (idem: 405) 660 Technium Social Sciences Journal Vol. 19, 654-667, May, 2021 ISSN: 2668-7798 www.techniumscience.com Figure 4. Final Cut (2004). Demonstration of Zoe anti-implant groups. Source: http://www.sensacine.com/peliculas/pelicula-52423/fotos/detalle/?cmediafile=18857064 In the unexpected final outcome of the film, Fletcher will access Bannister's memories only through the implant of Alan - who recorded his work sessions, and with them the images he saw - murdered to that end, since the original was destroyed during an argument between Alan and his girlfriend. After all, the work of the one Fletcher had accused one day of "taking lives, and making lies out of them" was useful. What interested Naїm the most, also the author of the script - as he states in an interview in the DVD edition ("Extras. Interviews") - was to explore the difference between how a person remembers certain moments, and how these actually occurred. The questions that arise are the following: Does it really make a difference? Is it more important the event or our perception of the event? Everyone's life is perceived in the first person. All our lives are subjective. Ultimately, I know nothing about you and we don't know nothing except by yourself. We cannot experience the world except for yourself. So, does it matter that something has happened, or is it more important to think that it has happened? (Final Cut, 2004) 4. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind by Michel Gondry Also the film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), directed by French filmmaker Michel Gondry (b. 1963, Versailles), raises the question of the manipulation of memory in the near future. However, the script (which many consider genius) is much more complex, creating a narrative at the very least labyrinthine: it earned Charlie Kaufman an Oscar, definitively establishing his enormous reputation as an original screenwriter. For his screenplay Kaufman will have looked for inspiration in some verses of the poem Eloisa to Abelard by Alexander Pope (1688-1744), which was written in 1716 - "How happy is the blameless vestal's lot! /The world forgetting, by the world forgot./Eternal sunshine of the spoteless mind!" (Ferraz, 2008: 44) 10 - from which the original title of the film is taken, but it 10 The poem was based on a true, and dramatic, love affair between a 37-year-old theologian and his student, a 17-year-old girl, and it is an inescapable reference point in the theme of impossible and unhappy love. Abelard 661 Technium Social Sciences Journal Vol. 19, 654-667, May, 2021 ISSN: 2668-7798 www.techniumscience.com will also have been based on the investigations of the American neuroscientist Karim Nader, and more specifically his theory on the reconsolidation of memories. For his screenplay Kaufman will have looked for inspiration in some verses of the poem Eloisa to Abelard by Alexander Pope (1688-1744), which was written in 1716 - "How happy is the blameless vestal's lot! /The world forgetting, by the world forgot./Eternal sunshine of the spoteless mind!" (Ferraz, 2008: 44)10 - from which the original title of the film is taken, but it will also have been based on the investigations of the American neuroscientist Karim Nader, and more specifically his theory on the reconsolidation of memories. In reality, no two evocations of the same experience are the same, and the term reconsolidation was applied by him to the inconsistency of so-called long-term memories, when these are played back through conscious thought. His theory, which called into question 100 years of conventional knowledge in this field, according to which we modify a memory every time we evoke it - that is, there are no faithful memories - was later confirmed by experiments carried out by the renowned American psychologist David L. Schacter, with volunteers whose brain activity was scrutinized through magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Figure 5. Eternal Sunshine… (2004). Joel Barish discovers the existence of Lacuna Inc. Source: http://avante7.com.br/brilho-eterno-lacuna-inc-quemvoce-apagaria/. Joel Barish (played by Jim Carrey), discovers one day with surprise that his ex-girlfriend Clementine Kruczynski (Kate Winslett) resorted, in a radical way, to a specialized company [figure 5], Lacuna Inc., to erase from her memory all the memories of her unsuccessful relationship. He too, disappointed, after contacting the company to talk to the doctor in charge and inventor of the process, decides to do the same, that is, to erase Clementine from his memory. Lacuna Inc. advertises his ability to provide the alternative of 'moving forward'. Joel is instructed to separate all belongings that are connected to his relationship with Clementine. They are what serve for 'mind mapping': as presented, a kind of brain digitalization that is a direct reference to modern brain imaging techniques of the neurosciences [figure 6], which will facilitate the technical process used. and Eloisa never stopped loving; he died in 1142 and she in 1162. In 1817 the mortal remains of the two lovers were transferred to the cemetery of Pére Lachaise in Paris. 662 Technium Social Sciences Journal Vol. 19, 654-667, May, 2021 ISSN: 2668-7798 www.techniumscience.com