Pieces of Light: How the New Science of Memory Illuminates the Stories We Tell About Our Pasts - Softcover

Fernyhough, Charles

Softcover

ISBN 10: 006223790X ISBN 13: 9780062237903

Publisher: Harper Perennial, 2014

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author

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.

From the Back Cover

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

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.

Edition details

• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Publication date: 2014
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 006223790X
• ISBN 13: 9780062237903
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 320