Keanu Reeves in Johnny Mnemonic (1995)
Johnny Mnemonic assumes that memory is a collection of fixed data items that can be stored and recovered. Such a view has been called into question by cognitive neuroscience, with its emphasis on plasticity and its demonstration that long-term memories are not embodied in singular locations but in neural connections as well as in different types of memory processed by different brain systems (Eichenbaum 2012). At the same time, like most movies of its kind, Johnny Mnemonic highlights connections between memory and emotion that have been corroborated by the mind and brain sciences, especially the role of emotion in encoding and retrieval (see Dunsmoor et al. 2015 for a recent example).
Keanu Reeves and Henry Rollins in Johnny Mnemonic (1995)
Movie poster
Inspired by the homonymous book by Fernando Vidal and Francisco Ortega, this timespace presents the authors' genealogy of the cerebral subject and the influence of the neurological discourse in human sciences, mental health and culture.