Searching For Memory: The Brain, The Mind, And The Past - Hardcover

Schacter, Daniel L.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0465025021 ISBN 13: 9780465025022

Publisher: Basic Books, 1996

Synopsis

Memory. There may be nothing more important to human beings than our ability to enshrine experience and recall it. While philosophers and poets have elevated memory to an almost mystical level, psychologists have struggled to demystify it. Now, according to Daniel Schacter, one of the most distinguished memory researchers, the mysteries of memory are finally yielding to dramatic, even revolutionary, scientific breakthroughs. Schacter explains how and why it may change our understanding of everything from false memory to Alzheimer's disease, from recovered memory to amnesia with fascinating firsthand accounts of patients with striking—and sometimes bizarre—amnesias resulting from brain injury or psychological trauma.

About this title

Review:

Daniel Schacter, a Harvard professor of psychology and researcher into the workings of memory and the brain, authoritatively summarizes the most up-to-date scientific knowledge in this controversial field. Many of the advances have come from the study of brain-damaged patients: some remember past events clearly, yet forget the basics of everyday knowledge; others have precisely the reverse affliction. Putting this work together with brain scans and experiments on normal people, a useful understanding has emerged of the connections between the brain and the mind, and of the different types of memory. Schacter also bravely refutes the notion of "recovered memory," arguing persuasively that false memories can be easily created.

About the Author:

Daniel L. Schacter is Professor of Psychology at Harvard University.

About this edition

• Publisher: Basic Books
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0465025021
• ISBN 13: 9780465025022
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 416