Learning and memory Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Learning and memory - Essay Example Senator and a ruthless political operative, played by Angela Lansbury. By programming his memory in this manner, the Koreans are able to program him into a killing machine. The cards function as the hypnotic device, while the Queen of Diamonds is the direct conditioning stimulus. Once he has killed, the soldier fails to remember his actions when the hypnotic spell is broken and his mind is wiped completely clear of any memory of his criminal acts in killing others. In effect, he suffers from a case of partial amnesia whenever he is conditioned and primed by the stimulus of the cards, so that the events occurring during the spell when he is conditioned are completely wiped out of his conscious memory. Implicit memory also plays a role in this film. Implicit memory is a separate kind of memory in which a person’s previous experiences may aid in the performance of a task without a conscious awareness of these previous experiences (Schacter, 1987). This is the case with the character of the soldier programmed to kill, as played by Laurence Harvey. He has been taught how to kill without scruples during a hypnosis session involving all of his team mates. In ordinary circumstances, his sense of ethics and morals could have functioned as a bar to indiscriminate killing and he would have found it acceptable to kill only in a war situation, being a soldier. However, under a state of hypnosis when he is in a temporary state of amnesia, his explicit memory of killing as a soldier serves to enable him to perform killing tasks with unimpaired ability because he always visualizes himself as being in a collective, combat situation with his team mates. However, these memories do remain as a part of his unconscious memory and the film deals with how one of his team mates helps him to break the amnesia that is cast upon him through conditioning. In the case of the character of Marco played by Frank Sinatra, the collective programming of memory that has