Pieces of Light: How the New Science of Memory Illuminates the Stories We Tell About Our Pasts

by Charles Fernyhough

Shortlisted for the 2013 Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books Leading psychologist Charles Fernyhough blends the most current science with literature and personal stories in Pieces of Light: How the New Science of Memory Illuminates the Stories We Tell About Our Pasts. A new consensus is emerging among cognitive scientists: rather than possessing fixed, unchanging memories, they have found that we create recollections anew each time we are called upon to remember. According to psychologist Charles Fernyhough, remembering is an act of narrative imagination as much as it is the product of a neurological process. An NPR and Psychology Today contributor, Dr. Fernyhough guides readers through the fascinating new science of autobiographical memory, covering topics such as: navigation, imagination, and the power of sense associations to cue remembering. Exquisitely written and meticulously researched, Pieces of Light brings together science and literature, the ordinary and the extraordinary, to help us better understand our powers of recall and our relationship with the past.

Genres: Science, Nonfiction, Psychology, Neuroscience, Brain, Memoir, Audiobook

320 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2012

About the author

Charles Fernyhough is a writer and psychologist. His non-fiction book about his daughter’s psychological development, The Baby in the Mirror, was published by Granta in 2008. His book on autobiographical memory, Pieces of Light (Profile, 2012) was shortlisted for the 2013 Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books. His latest non-fiction book, on the voices in our heads, is published by Profile/Wellcome Collection in the UK and by Basic Books (2016) in the US. He is the editor of Others (Unbound, 2019), an anthology exploring how books and literature can show us other points of view, with net profits supporting refugee and anti-hate charities.

Charles is the author of two novels, The Auctioneer (Fourth Estate, 1999) and A Box Of Birds (Unbound, 2013). His fiction has been published in several anthologies including New Writing 11 and New Writing 14. His books have been translated into twelve languages.

Charles has written for Scientific American, LA Times, TIME Ideas, Nature, New Scientist, BBC Focus, Guardian, Observer, Financial Times, Literary Review, Sunday Telegraph, Lancet, Scotland on Sunday, Huffington Post, Daily Beast and Sydney Morning Herald. He blogs for the US magazine Psychology Today and has made numerous TV and radio appearances in the UK and US, including BBC2’s Horizon, BBC Radio 4’s Start the Week, Woman’s Hour, All in the Mind and The Digital Human, and BBC World Service’s The Forum. He has acted as consultant on theatre productions on Broadway and the West End, numerous TV (BBC1 and Channel 4) and radio documentaries and several other artistic projects.

Charles is a part-time Professor of Psychology at Durham University, where he leads the interdisciplinary Hearing the Voice project, investigating the phenomenon of auditory verbal hallucinations. He has published more than a hundred peer-reviewed journal articles on topics such as inner speech, memory and child development.

Reviews

[David Rubenstein · Rating 3 out of 5]

This intriguing book is mostly about the psychological aspects of memory. Charles Fernyhough makes it very clear that the mind does not retrieve stored memories, but instead it reconstructs them. It mentions the various components of the brain, but has little to do with the microscopic level of neurons, synapses, and the internal wiring of the brain. There is some discussion of brain scans, but mostly it deals with psychological studies of memory.

Much of the book is anecdotal, while other parts describe various psychology experiments. Fernybough describes how some very young children can recall events, and how these memories are later lost. He describes post-traumatic stress syndrome, and how it can affect memory. He describes, mostly anecdotally, how memories that are thought to be lost can later be retrieved by triggers of smell, language, and an odd assortment of other things. And, he relates how false memories can be constructed through the power of suggestion.

This is an easy-to-read book, but much of it is not science. It is a collection of fascinating anecdotes. The author admits as much; "‘I set out to write about some science, and I ended up by telling a lot of stories." Maybe the subtitle should be changed, to better fit the subject of the book.

[Joanne Harris · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating. Learned; plausible; well-researched; beautifully-written, yet accessible enough for a non-scientist to enjoy and understand. The writer uses his own memories as well as case studies to challenge and explain the nature of what we remember, and how the process of remembering affects (and sometimes changes) existing memories. Ought to be recommended reading for anyone who still believes in the infallibility of one's own memory, or that of eyewitness testimony. Thrillers are rarely this thrilling.

[Nicky · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is rather more anecdotal than I’d hoped, often exploring memories through Fernyhough’s relationship with his own memories: memories of his father, teaching his children about his father, comparing his memories of a place to re-experiencing the place later on, etc, etc. Some of this is fascinating — especially his interviews with his grandmother, recording all the stories she had to tell. It’s a very personal thing, not scientific, but it’s interesting all the same; I sometimes get the same urge with my grandmother, just to capture the weird things she says sometimes that she trots out like proverbs and yet no one has ever heard before!

There are some discussions of more scientific stuff, and most of it seemed perfectly solid from what I know from other authors; it’s just, under the sea of anecdotal data, I don’t feel like I learned much. There’s nothing wrong with the writing style or the content, but it’s more H is for Hawk than scientific.

[Charlotte · Rating 4 out of 5]

I wish this book had been written last year! It would have been so useful for my dissertations. Fernyhough wants to debunk the popular conception of memory as a kind of filing cabinet (Harry Potter's penseive comes to mind) and instead show us how we create memories in the present moment, using data from the past that is stored in the brain. It's a completely readable book which patiently and sensitively discusses the human need to make memory 'conform to its master' in the present whilst remaining true to what actually happened. There is a kind of constant tension here.

He looks at how memory works on a neurological, science basis (which is fascinating for someone who knows so little about how the brain functions) and also uses fiction to illustrate how this pans out in the way that we tell stories to ourselves and to each other.

One of the most interesting things that I learnt was the way that memory and imagination are directly linked. Our ability to create memories about the past mirrors our ability to imagine ourselves in the future and brain activity is remarkably similar for both processes.

He sometimes seems a bit sentimental and wishy-washy but that's because he's being really brave actually in occasionally using himself as a test-subject and investigating the way that he remembers personal things that matter to him. I have great respect for this as looking at the way you remember / create your own personal narrative could be a scary prospect requiring a lot of self-honesty and a genuinely analytical approach.

If you are a memory-geek like me, you will love this.

[Tori · Rating 5 out of 5]

I need to own this book so I can flip through it when I want to remember the coolest facts about memory as narrated by the man who is my new hero. (Ironically, I can't retain this much awesome information in my head, so I require a non-library copy to remain in my possession for reference.)

Yup, Mr. Fernyhough, you're my new hero. You're British, and you write thoughtfully and in depth about memory (which is like my favorite subject ever), and you interviewed your ninety-three-year-old grandmother about her memories (which was like my favorite hobby during the seven months I lived down the street from my own 92-year-old grandmother, though I never recorded the discussions for transcription like you did). You referenced A.S. Byatt and Bruno Bettelheim, and your life and the lives of others, and scientific facts...You made me feel thoughtful and hopeful and a little nostalgic. And you named your daughter Athena.

[Holly · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was perfectly fine. Quite interesting explorations, though not so different from reading Joseph LeDoux or Daniel Schacter. Fernyhough is a good writer who also seems like a wonderful teacher and father. Something about the book didn't excite me too much, though. I can't really put my finger on why, except to say that it's quite anecdotal, and I often grew bored during the anecdotes of his own childhood, and his parents' lives, and his children, and his grandmother .... Though I enjoy memoir and first-person fiction I didn't wish to read personal anecdotes by a brain researcher. Maybe his style was missing something, here. I'm not sure. When he uses examples from novelists - Proust, Hilary Mantel, A.S. Byatt, Penelope Lively, W.G. Sebald - I was happier.

I'd been expecting at least a chapter on "highly superior autobiographical memory" and was disappointed that there was none. (The term is hyperthymesia, which I know from my own reading - not from Fernyhough naming it). I'm interested because I possess some of it myself, though not any sort of extreme case - (not Marilu Henner-like, and not like Jill Price). I have my own theories on why I can recall so much - it simply involves going back over everything that happens to me, thinking about past events a lot - re-hearing and re-seeing memories and conversations, as well as always being conscious of where i am in the present, what the date is, the context of the the event, putting things in order, in sequence, and lots of reflection, etc. He does mention Jill Price, but only in the context of a short discussion of people with disordered memory who are cursed with remembering everything.

I learned that some researchers now prefer to say déjà vécu ("already lived") rather than dévà vu ("already seen").

And: protein synthesis that underlies long-term potentiation (the physical changes in synapses that lead to persistent memory traces), and the factors such as sleep that may play a role. A crucial aspect of this process, reconsolidation,.... The phenomenon of reconsolidation shows that every time a memory trace is accessed, it becomes unstable for a brief time until it can be consolidated again.

On PTSD:
An event that will scar one persons for life will be shrugged off and forgotten by another. Conversely, PTSD diagnoses are occasionally made in response to events such as minor car accidents and overhearing sexual jokes at work, which many would judge unpleasant but hardly the stuff of trauma..... What is undeniable is that PTSD is at root a disorder of memory.

I liked this bit:
Novelist Penelope Lively described how, with advancing age, she had become more conscious of memory's ability to let us access the past on demand. "In old age, you realize that while you're divided from your youth by decades, you can close your eyes and summon it at will... The idea that memory is linear is nonsense. What we have in our heads is a collection of frames."

Still looking forward to reading Fernyhough's newest book: The Voices Within: The History and Science of How We Talk to Ourselves

[Gizem Kendik Önduygu · Rating 2 out of 5]

Selamlar Charles Fernyhough,

İstemiyorum senin analı, bacılı, kardeşli anılarını okumak, istemiyorum ya. Bi daha bilim ve edebiyat karışımı hiçbir şeye elimi sürmem.

Müsade varsa şuraya bir özet bırakıyorum.

Belleğin statik, geçmişten gelen yadigar, anıların zihin kütüphanesinde zihinsel DVD’ler olarak depolandığı veya fotokopi makinesi olarak görüldüğü dönemi geçtik.

Bellek anıyı bakmak için çağırmaz, her ihtiyaç duyduğunda onu yeniden kurgular/üretir. Bir anınız varsa, tastamam biçimlenmiş haliyle mevcut bir şeyi zaten geri almazsınız; yeni bir şey yaratırsınız. Anı geçmişle olduğu kadar bugünle de ilgilidir. Hatırlama şimdiki zamanda gerçekleşir. Otobiyografik bellekten gelen veriler, büyük ölçüde depolanarak inşa edilmiş olsa da şimdiki anın taleplerine göre yeniden düzenlenir. Bu yeniden düzenleme sürecinde geçmişle ilgili anılarımızı olaydan sonra edindiğiniz duygu ve inançlarla yönlendirirsiniz. Belleğin bu yeniden kurgulayan doğası onu güvenilmez kılar. Nihai sonuç göz alıcı ve ikna edici olabilir ama kaypaktır.

Kitaptaki 12 bölüm, neden çocukluğumuzu çoğunlukla hatırlayamıyoruz, neden en eski anılarımız zengin duyumsal ayrıntılarla dolu, neden anılarımız anımsayış patlaması denilen ve 11-25 yaşları arasına denk gelen zamanda zirve yapıyor, alan anısı ile gözlemci anısı arasındaki farklar neler, neden anıları onları yerleştirdiğimiz bağlamla, o anda kodladığımız enformasyonla hatırlamak daha kolay, bellek ne işe yarıyor, olmuş olanın kaydını tutmaktan ziyade gelecek olanı öngörmek için mi, bellek ne şekilde kaypak, travmatik anılar diğer anılardan farklı mı çalışıyor gibi soruların yanıtlarının biraz araştırma referansları ama çoğunlukla yazarın abuk subuk ana abacı kardeş anılarına referans verdiği cevaplarıyla dolu.

[Yaaresse · Rating 2 out of 5]

The author starts the last chapter by writing "I set out to write about science and ended up telling a lot of stories." (That quote may not be exact. I don't have the book in front of me.)

And that, folks, is the gist of the whole book. I felt like we never really got to the science or the psychology part of the book. There are a lot of anecdotes, mostly about the author, mostly about him going somewhere he hasn't been in years and observing himself trying to feel recognition. There are also a lot of stories about his daughter and his attempts to figure out how far back she can remember which just aren't that interesting nor informative. (And like all parents, he seems to think his child is far more interesting and entertaining than I did. Apparently he has a whole other book written about her.) The stories are repetitious, meandering and not that interesting. About halfway, I found myself checking to see how many pages were left in the chapter because I was flat-out bored and wanted to get to the "science" promised in the title.

By the way, the whole wandering through places one hasn't seen in 20-30 years and being surprised/disappointed that they don't "feel" familiar did amuse me at first. I lived in the same house for 18 years. If I went back there now, would it "feel" familiar? No, of course not. In the time since then, houses have been built, renovated and/or torn down, streets widened, trees grown or cut down, etc. No where does the author acknowledge that human environments are under constant change, so it is not even reasonable to expect something to feel the same as it did decades ago.

[Lynn · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a fascinating book about thought and memory. What is your first memory? Can false memories be put into someone's head? What causes traumatic flash back memories? Why can five people experience the same event and have five different versions of the story? How much of what I remember is gleaned from stories people tell, rather than from my memory? If you find these questions fascinating you will like this book. It is well written, well researched, and easy to comprehend.

[Charlene · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was just ok for me. I would have been much happier to spend my time reading the same topic by a different author.

[Kaeli Wood · Rating 5 out of 5]

wow. this was a fantastic book. i thought about my memories in a way i never had before, and it was at times disquieting and at times comforting. i was worried that the scientific approach to the way our brains hold onto our pasts would make me doubt my own stories, would remove the magical quality of remembering. but the sensitive, at times literary way fernyhough examines memory removes this trouble. our memories are valid, even if they are falsified. i especially liked learning about how children hang onto their memories, how soon they develop them. he reports noticing his few-week old baby develop memories that allowed her to predict what would happen-- every time after her bath, she knew she would be laid down near a pretty blue curtain, and would turn her head anticipating seeing it. he also reports interviews with a 2 year old who can remember details from a hospital stay when he was 5 months old, despite the fact that his parents had been instructed by the researchers not to talk to him about it and thus jog his memory. i thought this was pretty extraordinary. these are just a few of the fascinating case studies in the book; you can read about how trauma memories work, how memories work as we age, and how memories change over time... really, this review is messy, but the bottom line is that this book was so, so interesting.

[Jennifer Worrell · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fascinating study on memory that you don't need a PhD to decipher. However, the highlight of Fernyhough's nonfiction is his incredible literary talents. One section of the book details a return to a beachside scene visited in childhood with his dad; it contained some of the most visceral, beautiful writing I've read in any genre. This is the second book I've read by Fernyhough, and now I'm seeking out his fiction and more.

[Soho_Black · Rating 4 out of 5]

Over the years, I've seen the human memory at its best and worst. I watched my Nan suffer with Alzheimer's to the point she couldn't remember who anyone was, but also had a colleague who won a silver medal at the Memory Olympics for his ability to remember long strings of items. I also studied memory as part of a psychology degree but, perhaps ironically, I can no longer remember much of what I learned.

In ''Pieces of Light: The New Science of Memory'', Charles Fernyhough proposes a different way of looking at memory. He suggests that current research shows that memories are not all locked away in a vault ready for retrieval, but that every time we have a memory, we are rebuilding it on each occasion. He shows how this can mean people of different ages will remember things from different parts of their lives, depending on how their brains are wired and what can cause forgetting.

Although he doesn't specifically mention Alzheimer's, he talks about what can act as a block to memory in various ways and how traumatic events can take their own hold over our memories but can, in turn, be handled. There is a brief mention of how seemingly long forgotten events can be sparked into life with the right cues and how memories can be falsely generated or influenced by external factors, particularly in the very young.

Fernyhough writes in a very narrative style, which is unusual in what is essentially a textbook, but which gives the book a better flow than it may otherwise have had. He has written a novel and that experience stands him in good stead here. Even when the material does become a little more complicated, as he reports of research carried out on specific areas of the brain, his style means the book is always readable.

Even with my own studies in memory being so long ago, I was frequently fascinated by the research details here. Particular areas that concerned me were touched upon, with the ability to remember large amounts of data mentioned, if not fully explained or backed with research. More interesting to me personally was when he talked about how memory trick us into thinking life goes faster as you age, as that is something I have long felt is happening to me.

This factor helped me engage with the book more than I otherwise might have done, but all the way through I found myself thinking back and relating to areas Fernyhough discussed to my own life. As he talked about memory formation in childhood, I was able to find examples and there was a feeling of familiarity in other areas. Although I had a period of studying psychology, the information is so well presented that a reader will need no advanced knowledge of the subject to relate to the book in the same way I did. Some of the mentions of specific brain areas may get a little confusing, but there is a helpful diagram to show which parts he is talking about, which I referred to often.

If there is a downside to the book, it is that the narrative style works against the ability to find specific information quickly. It helps with readability and would increase the readership, but slightly hinders the use of the book as a research tool or as a traditional textbook. In addition, whilst the style makes it a decent read, it only explores memory and doesn't give any information on how to improve it, which the shelves of many bookstores suggest many people may be looking for.

However, as a starting point for those looking to find a little more about memory generally, or as a textbook for those new to studying psychology, this is a valuable resource. It is very easy to read and will encourage those who wish to do so to dig a little deeper. It has certainly awakened my interest in memory more than I recall the much drier textbooks of my psychology course doing and it's considerably cheaper than many of the books that failed to spark my interest back then, too.

This review may also appear, in whole or in part, under my name at any or all of www.ciao.co.uk, www.thebookbag.co.uk, www.goodreads.com, www.amazon.co.uk and www.dooyoo.co.uk

[Kathleen Jones · Rating 5 out of 5]

This has been my bedside reading for the past couple of weeks. I’ve always been interested in the way Memory and Imagination work together to create. How the imagination takes all the snippets of things we’ve stored in our brains over the years and weaves them into something completely new. What I didn’t realise, until I read Charles Fernyhough’s book, Pieces of Light, was just how dependent the memory was on imagination in order to enable us to remember.

It seems that our memories of past events aren’t stored in one place, like a video film, just waiting to be re-run, but in bits and pieces of information in different parts of the brain; smell in one place, sound in another, visual and emotional cues in others. When we try to remember something that happened to us in the past, our imagination comes into play to reconstruct the memory as a narrative, which explains why people remember things so differently, and memories alter through time - a minor detail when the event took place might acquire real significance later.

In amnesia victims, where the part of the brain that controls imagination is damaged, memory is severely disrupted and ‘forward thinking’ - the ability to speculate about the future - is impossible.

The way we encode our lives in the memory is also interesting - apparently we are all natural story-tellers. ‘Narrative,’ Fernyhough states, ‘is a key organisational force in autobiographical memory.’ We remember events as stories, pieces of narrative. The author comments in the book, ‘I set out to write about some science, and I ended up by telling a lot of stories’. It’s the story our brain remembers while the event itself fades. Our lives become a series of narratives. We seem to have a need to ‘create a coherent narrative about where one has come from’. But apparently it sacrifices accuracy in order to produce ‘meaning’ - the emotional value of the event is more important than the small detail.

Charles Fernyhough also looks at how, by giving fictional characters rich memory banks, we can make them more authentic for the reader. He uses Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall as an example of this, and discusses the work of W.G. Sebald and how he used memory to give a sense of reality - the texture of memoir - to his novels. Reading them, you are never sure whether this is reminiscence or fiction. There is ‘a kind of active remembering in which the world and self-hood are continually constructed and reconstructed - from present-day events and from not-quite-intelligible fragments of the past’.

There are some lovely interviews with Charles Fernyhough’s mother Martha, attempting to recall her life in conversations with the author, reconstructing it and discovering new perspectives as she gazes back at it across eight decades.

I liked the quote from a critic, discussing Proust (you can't really talk about memory without mentioning him): “Like our eyes, our memories must see double; these two images then converge in our minds into a single heightened reality”. Fernyhough goes on to elaborate: ‘Our two eyes, stereoscopically aligned, allow us to see space; memory allows us to ‘see’ time. Memories are about what happened then, but they are also about who we are now’.

[Dpdwyer · Rating 3 out of 5]

A good account of the latest understandings about human memory and how we form images of our selves. Lots of ideas to ponder:

"The truth is that autobiographical memories are not possessions that you either have or do not have. They are mental constructions, created in the present moment, according to the demands of the present."

"...when you have a memory, you don't retrieve something that already exists, fully formed---you create something new. Memory is about the present as much as it is about the past."

"...two forces in human memory: the force of correspondence, which captures memory's need to stay true to the facts of what happened, and the force of coherence, which works to make memory consistent with our current goals and or images and beliefs about our own selves."

"To remember the past, you tell a story about it. And in recalling the memory, you tell the story again. it's not always the same story, as the person telling it does not always want the same things. Memory fits in with the demands of the present as much as it tries to remain faithful to the facts of what happened."

Rebecca Solnit: "A happy love is a single story, a disintegrating one is two or more competing, conflicting versions..."

"The phenomenon of reconsolidation shows that every time a memory trace is accessed, it becomes unstable for a brief time until it can be consolidated again. That opens the door to change. In Joseph LeDoux's words, 'your memory about something is only as good as your last memory about it.' Catching a memory means breaking it open."

[Julia · Rating 2 out of 5]

Eh.
I was really interested to read this as a non-fiction book, I read some psychology in university but not much since and I thought it would be fascinating because of the way our memories define us.
The writer is a psychologist and a creative writer and the book therefore falls between both and for me, doesn't satisfy on either front. The explanations of the science and key concepts weren't constructed in a way that I really felt I was fully learning or understanding anything - maybe I'm not that bright but then this isn't intended as an academic text per se, and the tone of the personal anecdotes came across as smug or condescending to the point where I couldn't get invested in them to learn things "by accident" by engaging with the narrative. It was quite a slog to get to the last page.

[Heather · Rating 2 out of 5]

A lot of the real-life examples that the author used from his life were not compelling, especially the multiple recountings of his attempts to navigate through cities he once knew. These were often long drawn-out multi-page examples. He also became too technical at times. Some of the case studies toward the end of the book were more interesting, but even those he tended to become very detailed and lengthy. Editing out the unnecessary and uninteresting parts would have cut the book in half.

[Tessa · Rating 3 out of 5]

There is a lot of interesting information and is a digestible and easy to understand read but it often diverges into the author's personal anecdotes about his life and memory. It almost feels 3/4 memoir and 1/4 the psychological research of memory which is a bit disappointing.

[Pat Edwards · Rating 1 out of 5]

didn't live up to the hype. more anecdote than explanation. I wanted to see the connective tissue between a memory and the physical plant, but was disappointed.

[Melissa Seitz · Rating 5 out of 5]

For anyone interested in understanding how memory works, this book is for you! Fascinating!

[Shawn Gray · Rating 4 out of 5]

I especially enjoyed the last section of the book where the author interviews his grandmother to better understand her memory.

The sections on traumatic memory were also insightful and I found it interesting that some people may be more susceptible to PTSD and other response to trauma than others. It seems that, at least in some cases, our initial response to trauma and how we relate to it may have a strong influence on whether or not we experience PTSD. (Did that make sense?)

[Ann · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating. I recommend it especially to writers of memoir, for insight into how and why we remember the way we do. I love the author's mix of science and excellent storytelling.

[Raz Pirata · Rating 5 out of 5]

“If we are honest about how memory works, we need to be warry of its charms…(because) it is easy to be drawn into the fiction”

If I can’t control myself, what is about to follow is going to be a gushing of fandom, if professors of psychology have fans and writers of the highest order are psychologists. But as a caveat for you, two things must be made clear, one is that I am generally very bias toward books that teach me something interesting about the mind that is useful, and two, is that if a writer can make that usefulness entertaining, even slightly, you will get praise from me. Pieces of Light, however, is a bar raiser.

What Fernyhough has done in his masterfully crafted ode to memory is make a subject so academic in nature feel anything but. This book is eloquent, engaging, educational and entertaining. The heart of this book is an examination of memory and how modern cognitive science is explaining the frailty and flexibility of what we remember. It asks insightful questions that change our understanding of what memory is, how it works and ultimately the purpose of remembering.

“Memory narrativizes us, it turns us into characters in a novel, it makes motives and context matter”

The book purposefully moves between an autobiographical journey, current research and a new imagining of memory as constructed recollections made up of distortion, suggestions, and error. As you read this book, you will learn about why you should not trust your memory, or anybody else’s.

“Memories are about what happened then and about who we are now”

I will not, however, suggest or recommend this book. I will dare you to read it though. Because, really, by the time you are done your life will have changed some. You may be a little more careful with how certain you are about remembering things ‘exactly’ as they happened. You may find yourself thinking a little more critically and questioning things with more vigor. Or you may just decide that you need to re-evaluate everything you have come ever to believe.

This is a beautiful book.

Overall Score 5.0 / 5.0 ya damn right

In a sentence: A truly wonderful example of how scientific research can be bonded together by literary grace.

[Sally Brock · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not entirely the best book for a non scientist sort but truly interesting information about memory - something we all carry around within ourselves all of the time. How we bring them forth, how we circumnavigate them, how we reconstitute them and how, with them, we build a narrative of our lives. Memories are indeed curious things. I enjoyed the parts that were anecdotal, the stories that were attached to real folks.... those enduring PTSD and other traumas, those who've experienced amnesia type episodes, and those of regular folk, old and young as well. But it was also fascinating to read of some of the research being conducted. As more is understood about memory there are those psychologists who are looking at the legal implications of the dependability (or lack thereof in some cases) of eyewitness testimony, of manipulated memory, and various memory prodding, coping techniques such as EMDR. Very cool stuff indeed, at least the stuff I can remember anyway.

He says, "We are constantly editing and remaking our memory stories as our knowledge and emotions change. They might be fictions, but they are our fictions, and we should treasure them. Stories are special and sometimes they can even be true."

[Lynda · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is much like another book I read recently on time research. It discusses memory research but also delves frequently into the author's life story and experience. Some of it is interesting, some of it not. All in all, it seems like a lot of pages were taken up unnecessarily as it can be summed up by these words: memory is not what we thought in the past (sorry Freud) but is replaced with new material every time we try to access it. If you have a memory that is a narrative, you have added material. Memory is bits and pieces of data that our brain will try to string into a story. It is true of trauma as well, except that emotion during the initial experience blocks out certain information (not the traumatic stuff but rather the parts that don't fit with whatever story the brain is trying to form or add to that story; it drops the incidentals and keeps the emotional parts). So, the bottom line is that we can't trust memory to give any of us an accurate story about the past. According to the author, our memories are as much a product of the present as the past. That takes the breath out of you.
So the information in this book is important and will change the way you see memory. But the telling of it is rather cumbersome.

[Bob Collins · Rating 5 out of 5]

Memory as stories we tell ourselves? Memories as reconstructions from the elements laid down in the brain as opposed to a "movie in our head?" Fernyhough presents some of the best current research on memory and elegantly relates it to our propensity to tell stories. There is much we don't yet know about memory, but the newer abilities to examine a working brain at the molecular level is starting to tease out some tantalizing ideas (neuroscience) and the continued work of experimental (research) psychologists are also contributing to our knowledge of memory.

Our autobiographical memories tend to store the "gist" of things, rather than an HD-quality movie of our experiences. So, when we revive a memory, there are details missing; context might be fuzzy. But the brain doesn't like gaps in our "stories" so it fills them in and we're rarely aware of that activity. Often, we come close enough, sometimes we're way off. Fortunately, memory is mostly reliable, but don't bet too heavily on all the details!

A good read. Recommended.

[Shana Yates · Rating 3 out of 5]

Illuminating look at memory, how we think it works, and how incredibly malleable and ever-changing it is. Some of this material I have seen discussed in other books (on topics ranging from social science to medicine to criminal justice), but this cover various aspects of memory under one cover. Chapters include, among others, discussions of how trauma impacts memory, how memory is formed, childhood amnesia (the general forgetting that many of us have of our very early years), flash-bulb memories, and how aging impacts memory and time perception. Fernyhough, as a psychologist, also does an excellent job mixing his own personal stories of memory with what science has started to reveal about memory.

[Laura · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautifully written, contemplative book that crosses several genres, this is a blend of interesting scientific research on the topic of memory combined with moving passages about the author's father who was fond of nature walks ("We are comfortable with silence. Without the pressure of language, actual or expected, we can stretch out a little more easily into the people we are."), his daughter's childhood (a springboard for intriguing discoveries on children and memory), and his grandmother's East End childhood (in the context of the aging brain). Far better written than most books of this type, it makes a lot of slickly packaged popular neuroscience offerings pale by comparison.

[Bözsi Claussen · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book (given to me by Nev and Brad for Xmas/Birthday) brings together theories and knowledge that now is being most seriously considered or seems to be the case, well explained by Fernyhough, with many personal examples (drawn both from his own experience or from the experiences of others) of how memory seems to work in various ways. Having quite recently finished reading several of Oliver Sack's books, in which he discusses many memory anomalies and types of losses, or compensations etc., I felt this book tied in well with his. Definitely an enjoyable and informative read.

[Dhonna · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this book! I was fascinated and not only learned much but, feel more comfortable with my own memory experiences. It is amazing to me how people are so confident that they have remembered correctly. This books shows how fallible and how pliable our memories are. The author shares many personal anecdotes and cites research to clarify studies on the brains use of memory. Well written, with memorable stories.