How We Remember: Brain Mechanisms of Episodic Memory (Michael Hasselmo)

I love to study memory; it's my area of primary interest within cognitive psychology. For that reason, I expected to love this book, a close examination of how episodic memory works. Episodic memory is the memories of my actual life experiences, where I remember being there. For example, knowing what a toothbrush is for is a semantic memory, knowing how to brush my teeth is a procedural memory, but remembering brushing my teeth this morning, while looking out the window and observing that the sky is clear after days of rain--that is an episodic memory. I'm sad to say, however, that this book didn't work for me. Partly because this book goes deeper than my interest goes into those brain mechanisms mentioned in the title. I like to learn about different brain structures and how they work together, but kept skipping over the analyses of neural firing patterns in individual brain cells. Another problem I had is that the author explicitly defined episodic memory as the recovery of a spatiotemporal trajectory: first I went there and did that, next I went here and did this, and so on. I kept waiting for them to address the fact that some episodic memories don't have specific places and times linked to them, at least in my experience. Last week I was driving around town looking for a specific tree I had seen that I wanted to photograph. I had the location and time only very generally (somewhere within a half-hour or so of my house; somewhere in the winter, last year or perhaps the year before). I couldn't link it to anything that came before or after. But I had a clear memory of looking out the right side of the car as I rode in the passenger seat and thinking, "That's a really cool tree. I need to come back sometime and photograph it when the leaves are out." There is no trajectory in this memory, but it seems to me clearly to be an episodic memory, and this book can't account for it. While I admire and respect the work this author has done in uncovering some of the most basic aspects of episodic memory, all told it didn't click for me.

The Memory Garden (Mary Rickert)

As a pretty old woman myself, I appreciated a novel in which one of the main characters is an even older woman, portrayed with unsentimental honesty but also love and respect. Nan has sore bones and faulty memories, but she is loyal and as good as she know hows to be. The other main character is her adolescent adopted daughter, a foundling left on her doorstep, born under a caul that gives her powers she doesn't know about. The main action takes place in a few days, as estranged friends from Nan's past come to visit, but this visit is just the stage on which old memories play out their flawed, contradictory, and ultimately redeeming story. As we wind backward and forward in time characters cross the boundary between life and death over and over, to the point where at the end it's not clear which side of this line each is on. This book reminds us that memories, as unreliable and fickle as they are, make us who we are. Highly recommended for its quiet, simple, but profound story telling and the lush descriptions of gardens, food, and experiences in general.

The Rook (Daniel O'Malley)

The tag line reads, "On Her Majesty's Supernatural Secret Service," which is a pretty good indication as to the subject of the book. There's a super-secret organization in England (with counterparts in a few anglo-centric areas of the world) dedicated to using people with supernatural powers to fight problems generated by other entities with supernatural powers. The special conceit of this story is that it centers on one member of the organization, the Rook of the title (most of the organizational structure is inspired by chess, for unclear reasons) who starts the story by coming to standing in the rain surrounded by unconscious bodies, and she has no memory of her past self whatsoever. She finds a set of extremely chatty letters left for her by her former self and uses them to orient herself, identify the enemy who took her memory, and pretty much generally save the day. The story is fun enough, and I was never really tempted to abandon it, but belief just wouldn't suspend very well. The superpowers were an inexplicable mishmosh - this one can shape any metal with his fingers like putty, that one seems compelled to twist his otherwise-human body into pretzel shapes, this one oozes various toxic chemicals at will from his pores - they seemed arbitrary and nonsensical. I also had trouble with a really super-secret organization having such poor security, so that someone with no memory and just a few poorly-organized notes to go on could fake her way in without anyone suspecting she was a mole. Too may things seemed to happen just for the plot. To take an example from early in the story, no-memory girl is offered a choice by her former self: open one safe-deposit box at the bank and learn what she needs to know to function in the life she's stepped into, or open a different one and get everything she needs to start a new life elsewhere in the world. It apparently never occurs to her that she could open both before deciding. As I said, pleasant enough, but not much "there" there.

Mnemonology (James Worthen & R. Reed Hunt)

This small but dense scholarly text is not for the lay public. However, for a student of memory, it is an interesting examination of mnemonics; their history, their classifications, their effectiveness, and their use in everyday life, in education, and in rehabilitation. The authors argue strongly that the formal study of mnemonics is important to a complete understanding of memory, and that formal training in the selection and use of mnemonics would be a valuable addition to standard curricula at all levels.

Lost (Michael Robotham)

This exciting mystery-thriller opens with a police detective pulled from the Thames with a bullet hole in his leg. He spends 8 days in a coma and wakes up with no memory of the days before his injury. The rest of the story outlines his fight to remember what happened, starting only from his belief that it has something to do with the kidnapping and apparent murder of a 9-year-old girl three years before. I liked the main character, a flawed but determined fighter for lost children, and the supporting characters were also interesting and well drawn. The action, with its many twists, held me, and I liked the dimension of his amnesia (as someone with an interest in memory, it felt real to me). I'll read more by this author.

Moonwalking with Einstein (Joshua Foer)

Foer, a journalist, while covering the 2005 US Memory Championship, asked many of the contestants how they managed their amazing feats of memory, and they all said the same thing: Anybody can learn to do this, if they practice hard enough. So he decided to find out for himself. During the next year he studied all the mnemonic techniques the memory champions use, coached by Ed Cooke, English memory grandmaster, to prepare to enter the 2006 US Memory Championships. Along the way he researched many different aspects of memory, including the history of memorization techniques (starting from Simonides in his collapsed banquet hall), memory theories and education, savant syndrome, traumatic amnesia, training and expertise, and creativity. He blends all this information into a compelling (and scientifically accurate) view of the mind and how to use it. I was completely caught up in his drive toward the competition, and riveted by the action, cerebral though it might be, of the championship itself. The epilogue is the clearest explanation I have ever seen of the usefulness of mnemonics in the real world. Highly recommended.