Memory: Remembering And Forgetting In Everyday Life - Softcover

Barry Gordon MD

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1571010734 ISBN 13: 9781571010735

Publisher: Intelligence Amplifications Inc, 1995

Synopsis

An informative and entertaining explanation of memory, and how and why people remember or forget. This book combines the latest neuological findings about how the brain works along with fascinating stories of individuals who have experienced significant, and sometimes bizarre, memory problems.

About this title

About the Author

Dr. Barry Gordon is the founder of the Memory Clinic and the Cognitive Neurology /Neuropsychology group of the Neurology Department at the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions, where he is also a Founding Member of the Mind/Brain Institute. A world-renowed expert and specialist in the field, he has talked about memory on The Oprah Winfrey Show, the PBS series, "The Brain," NPR's "Fresh Air," Maryland Public Television's, "Improving Your Memory with Dr. Barry Gordon," the Today Show, Good Morning America, CNN's Weekend Housecall, NBC's Dateline, CBS's Morning Edition, the Discovery Channel, the Learning Channel and MSNBC On Air. He's frequently quoted in The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Time Magazine, Newsweek, USA Today, Parade, Reader's Digest, Prevention, Modern Maturity, and US News and World Report.

From the Back Cover

We all occasionally misplace the car keys, forget a name or go to the store to buy milk and come back with everything but! In fact, 67 percent of Americans claim they experience memory loss, but the truth is only a small proportion develop real memory problems due to brain disease. With memory, some things are serious; most are not, but count on a few surprises!

Contrary to popular belief, memory is not like a photographic record or a file in a computer than can be saved and called up anytime. And not all memories are created equal. You can improve your memory simply by adopting a positive attitude. Believing you are likely to remember something, does increase the chances you will.

In Memory: Remembering and Forgetting in Everyday Life, memory specialist Dr. Barry Gordon tells you why you forget the way you do; how to increase and improve your memory; the amazing feats your memory performs daily; and about extraordinary clinical tales of memory loss. Memory will answer your questions, such as: can a busy lifestyle cause forgetfulness; does stress or depression affect my memory; is memory loss inevitable as I age; and how can I tell if I have a memory problem.

From the Inside Flap

We all occasinally misplace the car keys, forget a name or go to the store to buy milk and come back with everything but! In fact, up to two-thirds of all Americans feel that they have problems with their memory. While most people's memory is more or less normal, its quirkiness can be confusing. This book will help you learn to harness your memory and make it stronger and faster.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Our memories are not complete, perfect, or permanent. We do not take everything into our memories, we do not save everything in original detail, and we do not keep memories forever. And from what we know about how memory is saved by the mind and brain, there is no reason to believe that we should.

The trap that may mislead people into thinking that memory can be both photographic and forever is the analogy that we may have with papers in a file cabinet or snapshots in a photo album. These are useful analogies - I have used them myself. But they are incorrect and misleading on this particular point. Our minds never take a snapshot of everything.

The kind of picture we take of our experiences in our mind, even while they are happening, is an incomplete one, already affected by our prior memories and expectations, as we have seen. SO the "snapshot" is not perfect to begin with. And memories change as they are kept in storage, unlike papers or pictures. It is almost certain that the pieces of information our brains store as memories are laid down overlapping each other. They are not kept on separate sheets or as separate pictures. Instead, the same letters that go to make up one message are used, in part, to make up another. The same dots on the page that make up one picture, are also used to mark up another.

So even if the actual letters or dots themselves were permanent in our memories - and we are not sure that they are - we could still not expect the messages they make up, or the pictures they create, to be really permanent and unchanging. The words will get altered; the pictures will smudge, streak, and melt into each other. A particularly distinctive phrase or sentence, a particularly important picture, may stand out and resist the constant reworking. And such singular memories may mislead us into thinking that everything is kept within our heads. But it is not.

Because of these processes alone - the imperfections of our initial record of experience, and the reworking of these memories over time - we should not expect our brains to be a vault of unaltered memories. There can be no magic potion to correct the imperfections of our original record of experience, nor any magic process that can reverse the mixing and churning of memories that takes places within our minds.

Edition details

• Publisher: Intelligence Amplifications Inc
• Publication date: 1995
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1571010734
• ISBN 13: 9781571010735
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 293