![]() ![]() Galgut's unsettling triptych of travel stories (shortlisted for the 2010 Man Booker Prize) play disarming tricks with perspective, as the Damon in the stories flips identities with Damon the narrator. ![]() In memory, we narrativise ourselves like novelists. Carruthers' dense, ambitious analysis of the medieval mind is an extraordinary work of scholarship. Carruthers provides a brilliant critique of key texts such as Frances Yates's The Art of Memory, showing that medieval memoria was nothing less than a theory of the recombinative power of thought. Building on classical ideas, such as the "method of loci" attributed to Simonides (think of a place and fill it with striking images corresponding to the items you want to remember), our medieval ancestors turned remembering into a developed art. Memory was a big thing when books had to be copied out by hand. While the field of memory has moved on a fair bit in the eighteen years since this was published, its erudition and scientific authority make it unmatched as an introduction to the study of autobiographical memory. Particularly interesting is his focus on how memory processes are depicted and interrogated by visual artists, although the pictures unfortunately don't reproduce too well in the paperback. In this, his first book, he provides a detailed and highly readable account of how memories are encoded, stored and retrieved, how remembering is damaged and preserved in amnesia, and how memories are distorted by trauma. Harvard psychologist Schacter has been a leading figure in the cognitive neuroscience of episodic memory. Searching for Memory by Daniel L Schacter In poised, humorous prose, he ranges from the stories of respondents to an 1899 survey who had "flashbulb" memories of hearing of the death of Abraham Lincoln, to the diary study of psychologist Willem Wagenaar, who for six years wrote out a daily memory so that he could test his own forgetting, to the nineteenth-century French philosopher Jean-Marie Guyau, who asked why the years speed by more quickly as we age. For the long view on how humans have gone about studying it, this book by a Dutch historian of psychology is hard to beat. Memory has been a topic of fascination for centuries. Why Life Speeds Up As You Get Older by Douwe Draaisma But several books, although sometimes a little out of date, had profound influences on my thinking about memory's slippery charms. Keeping up with the latest research meant that I stuck mainly to journal articles when writing Pieces of Light. Why do we get memory so wrong? One possible reason is that memories are precious to us: they define us in many ways, and so we react with discomfort to the idea that they are the constructions of a story-telling mind.Īlthough few scientists would quibble with the idea of the reconstructive nature of memory, there have been some hot new developments: in understanding the social dimensions of remembering, particularly in the very young and very old in working out how memory functions in trauma and extreme emotion and in linking remembering the past to thinking about the future, to imagination and to creativity. But surveys tell us that many people remain wedded to a view of memories as immutable, static possessions. ![]() A memory is stitched together in the present moment from several different kinds of information, in a process that's subject to the current beliefs and biases of the person doing the remembering. Roughly four decades of research (with historical precedents that stretch back much further) tell us that this kind of memory is essentially reconstructive. I was interested in a branch of memory research that straddles the two: autobiographical memory, or the memory we have for the events of our own lives. An essential distinction is between memory for facts (semantic memory) and memory for events (episodic memory). You can specialise in short-term memory (memory traces that persist for a few seconds) or cast your net into memories that stretch back through an entire human lifetime. No surprise, then, that studying memory proliferates into numerous sub-disciplines. Any intelligent system needs some way of tracking where it is in time, and that means remembering where it has been. W hen I told people that I was going to write a book on memory, I saw "good luck with that" written on a few faces. ![]()
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