eternal sunshine tugs my heart

i now place eternal sunshine of a spotless mind first on my tugs-at-heart movie list having watched it last saturday. originally-written by charlie kaufman, et al., it highlights the ordeals a person goes through after having a thread of his or her memory erased.it is a truly captivating film that sparked minutely scientific and philosophical questions in me: do brain surgeons think it's artificially feasible to delete a portion from our memory bank? how can they possibly mess up with the synapses we have in our brain? if the hypothalamus serves as seat of emotions and hippocampus for memory, how is the emotional pain inflicted during a certain past experience reconciled with just deleting a visual memory? can one really live eternally and totally oblivious of any traces from the past once the procedure is done? where does deja vu fit in then?