

But in reality, memories are distributed throughout the brain,” he says. There’s a scene with Elijah Wood, where they’re going into the brain, and ‘There’s a memory right here, it’s at point A in the brain’, and boom, they delete it. “One thing Eternal Sunshine got wrong was localizing memories. Ramirez mentions this movie in his Fast Company interview, pointing out a scientific flaw in it. Writer Charlie Kaufman and director Michel Gondry dreamed up this 2004 indie classic, in which a man (Jim Carey) and woman (Kate Winslet) attempt to erase the memory of their relationship. Below, a look at just a selection of movies that deal with twists of memory.Įternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Ramirez certainly has a point: Hollywood has long been fixated on the mystery of memory, with a heavy focus on what happens when it’s manipulated. “I even see a world where editing memories is something of a reality because we’re living in a time where it’s possible to pluck questions from the tree of science fiction and to ground them in experimental reality.” I also see a world where we can erase unwanted memories,” says Ramirez in the talk.

“I see a world in which we can reactivate any kind of memory that we like.

Watch this banter-filled talk for more detail on the process, and to hear the fascinating implications of the research. Finally, they experimented with activating the memory, even in the wrong context. Next, they had to figure out a switch for this memory - and they came up with a method that involves a laser beam. First, Liu, Ramirez and their team needed to get creative in order to isolate a single memory in a mouse’s brain. They also walk us through the steps of their research which, after being published in the journal Science, made waves in the international media. In today’s talk, given at TEDxBoston, Ramirez and Liu share more about their motivation for studying memory manipulation. “I feel that Hollywood is a repository of all these fantastic ideas, because nobody in Hollywood is limited.” “We began touching on these ideas mainly because all of us are huge fans of movies like Inception … For me personally, looking to Hollywood is a great source of questions,” Ramirez said in a recent interview with Fast Company Labs, about the study he describes in this talk. And there is a good reason for that: because the experiment was, in part, inspired by them. in which they located a specific memory in a mouse’s brain and designed a system to activate and deactivate it at will - might remind people of these movies. In today’s talk, MIT neuroscientists Steve Ramirez and Xu Liu admit that their latest study Even today, the cold, dead eyes of the sinister dummy serve as nightmare fuel.Total Recall, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Inception.

In the film’s climactic ending, we’re introduced to a story involving a ventriloquist dummy that set the stage for just about every inanimate-object-that’s-actually-alive film moving forward. Connecting five different stories from British filmmakers and a wrap-around, the film is a psychological creepfest and delivers what is arguably the best work of director Charles Crichton. Dead of Night (1945)īefore horror anthologies became a subgenre of its own, there was Ealing Studios’ Dead of Night. It’s moody, it’s creepy, and while it may not deliver the scares today like it did then, a rewatch showcases an influence that can still be felt. The Uninvited boasts high-caliber acting performances and, crucially, practical in-camera ghost effects that rely on lighting, sound, and wind machines. That’s a crime: It’s one of the titles that Guillermo del Toro cites as having a major impact on his own filmography. What is perhaps one of the first haunted-house films to treat ghosts as legitimate threats and sources of horror, the British-made flick has largely gone unnoticed by American audiences.
