The Book of Memory
How We Become Who We Are
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
A brilliant journey through the nature of memory, helping us understand how what is lost—and what is remembered—shapes who we are.
In this revelatory and intimate exploration of the way memory works, Mark Rowalds, author of The Philosopher and the Wolf, reveals how memories aren’t fixed. They soften and consolidate—and are distorted—each time we revisit them, even those memories most deeply engrained. The way we call on memory is closer to a "negotiation with the past."
From episodic memories like "shining islands in dark waters" and forgotten "Rilkean" memories that underpin our personalities and essential style to the memories we might hold that have been authored by others close to us, The Book of Memory draws on philosophical argument, a range of writers and thinkers, the latest neurological research, and psychology experiments to chart how memories are made, lost and remembered, with important consequences for how we understand ourselves.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Philosopher Rowlands (The Philosopher and the Wolf) weaves together philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, and personal anecdote for an expansive look at how memory shapes identity. Memories are made, preserved, and recalled in ways that imbue them with inaccuracies, Rowland notes, explaining that each time a memory's called up, it must be repackaged for long-term storage, a process wherein links are drawn between previously unconnected neurons; over time, repeated reconsolidations can warp the memory. Such edits may be a flaw of the human brain—or, as Rowlands suggests, an intentional means of ensuring memories are retained by tailoring them to better fit one's current context. (The author describes a childhood memory in which his father now looks like an "old man"—a way of retaining the memory in the absence of a ready image of his father's younger face.) He also explores how memories can be passed from one person to another, with children, for example, sometimes absorbing their parents' memories. Throughout, Rowlands provides perceptive insights into how the brain negotiates the past, how memory shapes the self, and how identity is therefore best understood as a complex, shifting entity that exists beyond "the spatial boundaries of your body" and experience. ("The question of when and where you begin and when and where you end has no straightforward answer," he observes.) The result is a mind-expanding meditation on what humans recall and why.
