The Chamber of Secrets: Where Memories Lie

As part of starting this blog, I thought it would be fun to re-read the Harry Potter series. I was able to find another three-hour block to immerse myself in the Chamber of Secrets. Because I have been thinking about the brain recently, I found it uncanny that the subject of memory is prominent in Book 2. One might even speculate that the phrase “chamber of secrets” can be applied to the brain (the chamber) and memories (the secret contents).

Memories are strange things. We don’t quite know where they reside or how they are stored or indexed, although neuroscientists are working hard at trying to understand all of this. False memories can be planted, and it is almost certain that what we might think of as “true” memories are easily changed and embellished over time unless we had a way of keeping the “original” ones intact. Events that one experiences can certainly be recorded and stored by strapping a video recorder to one’s head or wearing a Google Glass. But prior to these recent inventions and having cheap digital data storage, our memory of events experienced can be quite fleeting.

Tom Riddle preserves a memory of his sixteen-year-old self in an enchanted diary. I was struck by the similarity to Harry’s experience with the diary to a later experience with the Pensieve. Although if this was indeed Riddle’s memory, it seems inconsistent that Harry lands in the Headmaster’s Office prior to Tom’s arrival, and in fact behind closed doors. Maybe it’s an inconsistency in this earlier book prior to the Pensieve being introduced and the explanation of how it worked. However, maybe in this case, the diary is different and not just a container of memories, but certainly an independent actor in its own right.

However before Harry learns about the diary, he and all of Hogwarts is introduced to the very annoying Gilderoy Lockhart. What is Lockhart’s specialty? Memory charms! He tracks down magical folks who have carried out daring deeds, modifies their memories, and then claims those great deeds for himself. For some reason this time around, reading Book 2 got me thinking about how memory erasures work. I also recently re-watched Men in Black 3, where the equivalent approach is to use the neuralyzer on Earthlings (akin to Muggles) who have witnessed alien activity. I haven’t done the research to know if electro-stimulation methods have been used in psychiatric patients to erase memories in real life. It certainly has been used for other reasons. (Oddly enough I also watched the new version of Total Recall recently on DVD.)

To modify or in this case erase a recent memory, the spell Obliviate is cast with the aid of a wand in the Harry Potter world. I imagine that the spellcaster points his or her wand at the forehead of the “victim” while carrying this out. (Perhaps this residual image comes from the movies.) In the Men in Black world, the neuralyzer flashes a blue light at the onlookers while the men in black are protected if they wear appropriate (and presumably special) eye-protection.

Now if one thinks of brain storage and activity as a series of electrical signals, then one could disrupt those signals with electromagnetic (EM) radiation. The EM pulse strategy is a staple of science fiction plots to disable electrical activity. (Now as a chemist, I would say there is plenty of chemical signaling in the brain, but presumably this can also be disrupted by EM radiation.) The EM pulse idea (with its bluish glow) can be plausibly attributed as the mechanism of the neuralyzer in the where the radiation “enters” through the eyes (which just witnessed the event) and disrupts the forming of the memory in the brain. The Obliviate spell might do the same although the books do not make it clear where the entry point is if one is needed. Is that how spells work over distance? We can’t see the mechanism with the naked eye but maybe spells manipulate that which cannot be seen – electromagnetic waves, which then go on to manipulate other material objects. In the case of memory modification the objects could be the “physical” memory storage devices (I would say “chemical”). But maybe all spellcasting has a similar basis in the way matter is manipulated via EM waves, and that this becomes most obvious in battle spells with their flashes of red and green jets of light as depicted in the movies.

So much to speculate on, so little time! I will probably have to work on a multi-part feature on magic and science, oh, somewhere in the near future.