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Searching for Memory: The Brain, the Mind, and the Past
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Searching for Memory: The Brain, the Mind, and the Past description
Daniel Schacter, a Harvard professor of psychology and researcher into the workings of memory and the brain, authoritatively summarizes the most up-to-date scientific knowledge in this controversial field. Many of the advances have come from the study of brain-damaged patients: some remember past events clearly, yet forget the basics of everyday knowledge; others have precisely the reverse affliction. Putting this work together with brain scans and experiments on normal people, a useful understanding has emerged of the connections between the brain and the mind, and of the different types of memory. Schacter also bravely refutes the notion of "recovered memory," arguing persuasively that false memories can be easily created. |
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Searching for Memory: The Brain, the Mind, and the Past Customer Reviews
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♥♥♥♥♥ |
Informative and revealing
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| Make no mistake, this is an excellent read regarding memory. In many ways, however, it acts to spotlight more what we DON'T know about memory than what we do. It focuses on location of activity in the brain insofar as discussing how memories are made, rather than the nuts and bolts of HOW they are crafted. In other words, it's as if you were an observer on a hill far above a town and you, not knowing any history of transactions or how stores work, watched many people enter a building, and coming out with items. If you didn't know how monetary exchanges worked, you could still hypothecize that "something" occurred in that building that enabled people to go in empty-handed but come out loaded with goods. But you might have no idea about how money worked or how barter might work. You simply wouold have no way of really knowing what took place in those mysterious locations. So it is with Schacter's book: repeatedly he talks about the hippocampus or other location in the brain as being a spot of brain activity when memories are recalled, but that says nothing about how they are recorded. Thus, the book does not address the specifics of how immaterial subjects such as ideas could be remembered in the physical world of the brain. I for one liked the constant usage of paintings to make his points about the "fragile power" of memory--it is through painters and novelists (creators) that we can learn a great deal of the depth of power, angst, and despair that memories (or the lack thereof) can cause. Seems perfectly appropriate to me. A good read and focuses more on breadth than depth, which again, perfectly appropriate for a lay audience. |
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