Memories are Made of This: The Biological Building Blocks of Memory

(Hardback)

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Memory is what defines who we are and who others are in our minds. Memory shapes our moral and intellectual personality, and the way we think and behave. Indeed, it would be impossible to live as one person, with an individual history or consciousness, without the memory threads that constantly link our present to our past and future. But why are memories so complex and mysterious In every instance we are remembering something, but how are memories formed And why, if remembering is so ordinary, do our memories fail so often What is happening in the brain when we recall a face, reconstruct the image of a place, or struggle to find an answer that we think we know Does storage imply that memories are fixed in particular chunks of brain tissue, or is it a dynamic, biologically creative process that involves many different parts of the brain How long do different memories last What do genes have to do with memory And, finally, are we the only creatures that remember and forget, and, if not, are there commonalties in memories of different species This is a fascinating work of popularisation that attempts to answer all these questions and more, deftly weaving the history of ideas about memory with cutting-edge science and psychology.

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Author Bio

Rusiko Bourtchouladze is at the Center for Neurobiology and Behavior at Columbia University, USA where she works in the laboratory of the Nobel-prizewinning biologist Eric Kandel. She has been involved in memory research for more than twenty years and has published numerous papers and articles on the topic.