Pieces of Light: How the New Science of Memory Illuminates the Stories We Tell About Our Pasts
3.5/5
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About this ebook
Short-listed for the Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books, the Best Book of Ideas Prize, and the Society of Biology Book Awards • Book of the Year: Sunday Times, Sunday Express, and New Scientist
“In its stunning blend of the literary with the scientific, Pieces of Light illuminates ordinary and extraordinary stories to remind us that who we are now has everything to do with who we were once, and that identity itself is intricately rooted the transporting moments of remembrance. We are what we remember.” — André Aciman, author of Out of Egypt and Harvard Square
A new consensus is emerging among cognitive scientists: rather than possessing fixed, unchanging memories, we create new recollections each time we are called upon to remember. As psychologist Charles Fernyhough explains, remembering is an act of narrative imagination as much as it is the product of a neurological process. In Pieces of Light, he illuminates this compelling scientific breakthrough in a series of personal stories, each illustrating memory's complex synergy of cognitive and neurological functions.
Combining science and literature, the ordinary and the extraordinary, this fascinating tour through the new science of autobiographical memory helps us better understand the ways we remember—and the ways we forget.
Charles Fernyhough
Charles Fernyhough is an award-winning writer and psychologist. His books include A Thousand Days of Wonder: A Scientist's Chronicle of His Daughter's Developing Mind and the novels The Auctioneer and A Box of Birds. He has written for the Guardian, the Financial Times, and the Sunday Telegraph; contributes to NPR's Radiolab; blogs for Psychology Today; and is a professor of psychology at Durham University in the United Kingdom.
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Reviews for Pieces of Light
13 ratings1 review
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5I set out to write about some science, and I ended up by telling a lot of stories. In memory, more than in any other aspect of human experience, narrative seems to be the appropriate medium.Narrative does seem relevant, since the new plasticity theory of memory resembles storytelling -- that memory isn't a finished "DVD" we simply re-watch, but rather is a collection of data elements that we imaginatively reconstruct, in real time, during each recollection. And Fernyhough's narrative is interesting, with the exception of too-long recaps of experiments with his own personal memories (which, with one exception, are so inward-focused and blinder-ed that I couldn’t play along with my own memories). He also profiles the experiences of a handful of people with memory disorders and analyzes characters' experiences from literature -- most notably Proust’s use of a madeleine to illustrate how strongly our senses evoke memory.But I came to this book expecting a lot more of the "science" of the subtitle. Fernyhough touches on a number of promising topics: children's first memories and adult memories of childhood; conflicting sibling memories; "flashbulb memories" (the where-were-you-when-[x]-happened memories of high-emotion historical events); the correlation between older age (where there are fewer new experiences/new memories) and the faster passage of time; false memory; amnesia; and dementia. But they're only touches. I encountered just one particularly new takeaway: an exploration into why memories feel *familiar* (i.e. feel like they indeed happened to us rather than were just witnessed by us, e.g. in a dream) ... which led to a theory that deja vu may be a miscue where this familiarity is evoked during encoding the initial experience vs. later, during the remembered experience ... and led to a theory that PTSD may be another miscue that makes an experience feel like it's happening again vs. being recalled.Overall, this is recommended for readers interested in a mostly psychological and personal, not biological, exploration of memory. Actually, Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending is a much more interesting narrative of memory.(Review based on an advance reading copy provided by the publisher.)