Memory - Alison Winter

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superseded, replaced by the current understanding of memory as the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.