The Science of Dollhouse

A look at the premise of and science of the new Joss Whedon series, Dollhouse, premiering on US TV (and less legal forms soon after) this month...

Joss Whedon's imminent new series concerns operatives so secret that even they don't know what they're up to. In the illegal federal operation known as the 'Dollhouse', agents are imprinted with cognitive and muscle-memories adapted to their latest mission, and conclude their assignments by being wiped of any recollection of them. The series centres on Echo (Eliza Dushku), a 'doll' or 'active' who begins to attain self-awareness, and (presumably) to learn from her experiences in some way that the mind-wiping process should technically render impossible.

Fiction about amnesia and disassociation strikes a predictably popular chord with the youth demographic unsure about its own identity or place in the world, but the fascination transcends demographics: the notion of rearranging, erasing or artificially augmenting our own memories is the stuff of both fantasy and nightmare, from Neo's suddenly 'knowing' Kung-Fu after a dose of Tank's skill-stacks in The Matrix, to the instinctive horror of forgetting crucial experiences, as with the numerous victims of the 'neural neutraliser' in the Men In Black movies.

Altering memories via technology remains in the realm of science-fiction; neuroscience is still obtaining early theories from phenomena that it barely understands. Baffling synergies emerge from the hard facts, such as the damaged brain's capacity to restore cognitive memory from areas of the brain which are not associated with it.

In order to develop the science-fictional tools needed to manipulate memory, science needs to individuate the relationship between cells and memory. The day that the current mystical veil on memory is lifted and thoughts finally become classified as 'tissue' will be a politically problematic one at best. At worst it will be an ideological and ethical earthquake.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that this moment of revelation is coming up: the research of psychoneuroimmunologist Dr. Paul Pearsall provides a strong indication that memory is meat - unless, of course, one wishes to interpret his findings in a supernatural or spiritual sense.

Certainly Pearsall's various studied case-histories of transplant patients provide creepy moments to match the plot set-ups of schlock horror such as The Eye (2007), or the Michael Caine film The Hand (1981); a gay woman in her late twenties receives the heart of a nineteen year-old heterosexual vegetarian girl and gives up meat...and women; an 18 year-old boy writes a poem about 'giving his heart' to 'Danny', and the young woman (called 'Danielle') who receives his heart in a transplant is able to finish the lyrics before they are completely read out to her the first time; a middle-aged white man receives the heart of a young black man, and inherits his donor's love of classical music. The donors were anonymous in these cases, these facts assembled instead by research. The stories are numerous, and if true either bespeak proof of a supernatural world... or evidence that our very memories can be cut out of us with a scalpel, and are therefore ultimately subject to science, as in Dollhouse.

This is not to say that your 'mojo' can be removed in the style of an Austin Powers movie, any more than your DNA can be 'removed' with a mouth-swab. Even putting aside the notion of genetic memory, there's a lot of evidence that nature, ever a pessimist, stores memories in more than one place in the brain, and Dr. Pearsall's transplant anecdotes - which concern the transfer of hearts rather than brains - posit the possibility that memories may be 'backed up' in the most basic proteins of our bodies.