Johnny Mnemonic

In Johnny Mnemonic (1995), the hero is a “mnemonic courier” who gives up all his childhood memories to make room for data he carries in a brain implant. After accomplishing his mission, Johnny wants his memory back.

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).

Vidal, Fernando and Ortega, Francisco. Being Brains: Making the Cerebral Subject (Forms of Living)....

Johnny Mnemonic on IMDb

Eichenbaum, Howard. 2012. The Cognitive Neuroscience of Memory: An Introduction. 2nd ed. New York: O...