In Popular Culture
The absence of retrospective memory creates an amnesia that has frequently been a key element in plot lines in television, film and novels. Some examples are:
- Remember Me, a novel by Sophie Kinsella, in which amnesia is caused by trauma.
- The Bourne Identity, a novel by Robert Ludlum and a film adaptation, in which amnesia is caused by trauma.
- Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, a film by Michel Gondry, in which amnesia is caused by a company who are hired to erase painful memories.
Memory is frequently the subject of many wise quotations. The following are some examples relating to retrospective memory (or lack thereof):
- Memory is the diary that we all carry about with us.-Oscar Wilde
- Not the power to remember, but its very opposite, the power to forget, is a necessary condition for our existence.-Sholem Asch
Read more about this topic: Retrospective Memory
Famous quotes containing the words popular culture, popular and/or culture:
“Popular culture is seductive; high culture is imperious.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“We live under continual threat of two equally fearful, but seemingly opposed, destinies: unremitting banality and inconceivable terror. It is fantasy, served out in large rations by the popular arts, which allows most people to cope with these twin specters.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)
“A culture may be conceived as a network of beliefs and purposes in which any string in the net pulls and is pulled by the others, thus perpetually changing the configuration of the whole. If the cultural element called morals takes on a new shape, we must ask what other strings have pulled it out of line. It cannot be one solitary string, nor even the strings nearby, for the network is three-dimensional at least.”
—Jacques Barzun (b. 1907)