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Memory, January 2012
Hardcover / e-Book
Fragments of a Modern History
University Of Chicago Press
January 2012
On Sale: January 16, 2012
312 pages
ISBN: 0226902587
EAN: 9780226902586
Kindle: B006ZAP342
Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction
Picture your twenty-first birthday. Did you have a party? If
so, do you remember who was there? Now step back: how clear
are those memories? Should we trust them to be accurate, or
is there a chance that you’re remembering incorrectly? And
where have the many details you can no longer recall gone?
Are they hidden somewhere in your brain, or are they gone
forever? Such questions have fascinated scientists for hundreds of
years, and, as Alison Winter shows in Memory: Fragments of a
Modern History, the answers have changed dramatically in
just the past century. Tracing the cultural and scientific
history of our understanding of memory, Winter explores
early metaphors that likened memory to a filing cabinet;
later, she shows, that cabinet was replaced by the image of
a reel of film, ever available for playback. That model,
too, was eventually superseded, replaced by the current
understanding of memory as the result of an extremely
complicated, brain-wide web of cells and systems that
together assemble our pasts. Winter introduces us to
innovative scientists and sensationalistic seekers, and,
drawing on evidence ranging from scientific papers to
diaries to movies, explores the way that new understandings
from the laboratory have seeped out into psychiatrists'
offices, courtrooms, and the culture at large. Along the
way, she investigates the sensational battles over the
validity of repressed memories that raged through the 1980s
and shows us how changes in technology—such as the emergence
of recording devices and computers—have again and again
altered the way we conceptualize, and even try to study, the
ways we remember. Packed with fascinating details and curious episodes from
the convoluted history of memory science, Memory is a book
you'll remember long after you close its cover.
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