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 entered my life as Shirley Temple, who was exactly my age and wrote a letter in the newspapers telling how her mother fixed spinach for her, with lots of butter.... I was impressed by Shirley Temple as a little girl my age who had power: she could write a piece for the newspapers and have it printed in her own handwriting.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“If the Union is now dissolved it does not prove that the experiment of popular government is a failure.... But the experiment of uniting free states and slaveholding states in one nation is, perhaps, a failure.... There probably is an “irrepressible conflict” between freedom and slavery. It may as well be admitted, and our new relations may as be formed with that as an admitted fact.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)
“No race has the last word on culture and on civilization. You do not know what the black man is capable of; you do not know what he is thinking and therefore you do not know what the oppressed and suppressed Negro, by virtue of his condition and circumstance, may give to the world as a surprise.”
—Marcus Garvey (1887–1940)