Dr. Metablog

Amnesia on Film: The Vow (2012)

Amnesia movies continue to thrive. This latest, The Vow, made a bunch of money but was widely panned.  And should have been. It's a sad sad day when the amnesia is more credible than the male lead.

The Vow purports to be based on the story of Krickitt (sic) Pappas, who lost the memory of eighteen months of her life in a automobile accident. Her husband re-courted her. and re-won her; they lived happily ever after. They're sticking to the story that she never regained her memory of those lost months.

i have no particular reason to doubt the tale, improbably though it might seen. The brain is another country; they do things differently there. And Rachel McAdams, who plays Krickitt, is the most persuasive amnesia-victim I've yet encountered. Because she doesn't take the amnesia for granted, Hollywood-wise, but struggles to figure it all out, she seems to be genuinely afflicted.

Nevertheless, it's incredible that she should be in love with that lump of all lumps, the lumpish Channing Tatum, who turns his character, Kim Carpenter, into a affectless lump.  I've encounted talentless actors in my life, but Tatum is something special.

Nor do I believe that the lovers either met or were reunited at the "Cafe Mnemonic."

The Vow is pure, unashamed soap opera, although it is more credible about the disease than most amnesia offerings, perhaps because it offers no cooked-up, nonce oversimpliication of what's going on in the brain. 

 

Shakuntala Devi's Brain

Shakuntala Devi, who died in India a week or so ago, was an incredible arithmetician. She once "accurately multiplied two random 13-digit numbers in a few seconds." "On a visit to this country, an American psychologist set her two problems: the cube root of 61,629,875, and the seventh root of 170,859,375. Shakuntala Devi gave the correct answers - 395 and 15 - even before he started his stopwatch."

No one knows how she did this. No one has even advanced a persuasive theory.   

It's difficult for me to remember a thirteen-digit number. I don't think I could remember two thirteen-digit numbers. It's beyond my imagination to think about multiplying them (to produce the correct twenty-six digit answer).

I'm wondering whether Devi's abilities seem so astonishing because she's out there all by herself. If there were a cohort of people who could easily multiply 8, 9, or 12 digit numbers it wouldn't seem so wonderful that she could do 13. But she's unique.

And intimidating.

But then I'm intimidated by Mozart, whose feats are also beyond imagining.

I wonder whether Ms. Devi carried some sort of genetic mutation. Is remarkable proficiency at mental arithmetic an inheritable trait?  Which makes me wonder, when did homines sapientes acquire the ability to learn the times table?  When did the mutation for that trait first appear?

I telephoned my consultant on such matters, the blogger Political Mammal. He says that the ordinary brain, yours and mine, does so many calculations just when we walk down the street and compare this storefront to the one that went out of business and to the similar one on the next block that, well,  we should be just as astonished at quotidian events as at mental arithmetic.  I see his point. Who knows how many synapses are firing now, even as I'm writing this simplicity-itself post.

But writing a few words is a commonplace miracle;  extracting seventh roots -- now, that's something else.