His Memory Returns, Byte by Byte This then-37 year-old former professional stuntman lost his memory and sense of identity after a violent assault in a Paris suburb three years ago. “I had absolutely no memory of who I was before the incident — I had to start again from the beginning.”

While it is the archetype we all learned from the movies*, this type of ‘total amnesia’ is very rare and is not a consequence of neurological injury to the brain but rather an extreme psychological reaction to the overwhelming emotional trauma. He embarked on a harrowing process of reinventing himself, and his knowledge of the world, from scratch, and he credits the Internet as crucial to the process. “For someone like me that was missing all his cultural references, the Internet was an extraordinary tool for filling in the gaps,” he said. “I organized my brain like a hard drive and sorted the information I found on the Internet into folders and files in my mind.” He now has a website up to provide information on memory loss. Wired

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*Here, part of a site discussing the depiction of disabilities in film, is a list of films using amnesia as a plot device. A more useful list (however, one to which I can’t give you a one-click link) results from searching the Internet Movie Database for “amnesia” in Plots (>80 hits) or Keywords (>220 hits).