Table of Contents

* Introduction: Memorys Fragile Power * On Remembering: A Telescope Pointed at Time * Building Memories: Encoding and Retrieving the Present and the Past * Of Time and Autobiography * Reflections in a Curved Mirror: Memory Distortion * Vanishing Traces: Amnesia and the Brain * The Hidden World of Implicit Memory * Emotional Memories: When the Past Persists * Islands in the Fog: Psychogenic Amnesia * The Memory Wars: Seeking Truth in the Line of Fire * Stories of Elders

About the Author

Daniel L. Schacter is professor and chair of psychology at Harvard University. He is the author of Stranger Behind the Engram: Theories of Memory and the Psychology of Science (1982) and has received the Troland Research Award from the National academy of Sciences. He lives in Newton, Massachusetts with his wife and two daughters.

Reviews

Harvard psychologist Schacter (Victims of Memory, LJ 4/15/95) here delivers a solid, thoughtful analysis of memory, underscoring the relationship between memory's limitations and its pervasive influence as the core of how the past shapes the present. Memory, he writes, is not to be conceptualized as a unitary phenomenon but as a composite of separate processes and systems. Memories do not emerge as passive recordings of reality but also store meaning and emotion. Consequently, the way we perceive events plays a major role in what we later recall. Schacter argues effectively that it is important to know how past memories shape present realities. Echoing Barry Gordon's Memory: Remembering and Forgetting (Mastermedia, 1995), this analysis of a burgeoning new area of study is recommended for informed readers.‘Dennis Glenn Twiggs, Winston-Salem, N.C.

Schacter, a Harvard psychology professor, has produced a full, rich picture of how human memory works, an elegant, captivating tour de force that interweaves the latest research in cognitive psychology and neuroscience with case materials and examples from everyday life. Clinical studies of brain-damaged and amnesiac patients reinforce his thesis that memory is not a single faculty, as was long assumed, but instead depends on a variety of systems, each tied to a particular network of brain structures, all acting in concert so we recognize objects, acquire habits, hold information for brief periods, retain concepts and recollect specific events. Aided by numerous reproductions of contemporary paintings that evoke the subjective workings of memory, Schacter explores how we convert fragmentary remains of experience into autobiographical narratives. Implicit memory, at work even when we are unable to fully recall recent events, pervasively, unconsciously colors our perceptions, judgments, feelings and behavior, he maintains. Chapters also cover distortion in memory, repressed memory of childhood sexual abuse, recollection of extreme trauma and memory impairment with aging. This wonderfully enlightening survey enlarges our understanding of the mind's potential. (June)