Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

[Jeunemaitre]

About the erasure of painful memories, well, interesting concept, but something I would NEVER want to try. I have a lot of painful memories, but in betwixt the painful wincing there are bright flashes of goodness.

I think I know too much bio-psych to enjoy this movie (that happens whenever I know enough to look at a piece of technological fiction and say "That could never happen" and have reasons why). It's been a while since I was in cognitive psych, or bio-psych, but the last I heard, the location of memory in the brain was not something that could be pin-pointed, therefore erasure would involve a lot of collateral forgetfulness... Hmm.

I'm trying to think of a good analogy that might apply, but using a pistol to try and destroy a single file in a filing cabinet comes to mind. However, I'm also reminded of a post a while back about whether the moderators on this board have the ability to delete a whole post, rather than editing/blanking it: the problem exists when that post has children in the thread, the board is not equipped to deal with orphan posts. Because so much of our processing of the present is based on our memories and our decision heuristics (based on prior experience-memories), our current and future personality is likely to change if part of our memory is deleted and left with an open hole.

The other reason I probably won't like this movie is because I generally don't like Jim Carrey's style of physical comedy. Ahh, who knows...

Certainly not me.