The Making of Memory

300 pages. cover worn, writing on inside cover, text lightly tannedThe human brain weighs, on average, just over two pounds, is wrinkled like a walnut and has the colour and something of the consistency of porridge. Yet some how the interactions of the ten billion cells that comprise it produce our capac ity to think, hope, believe, imagine, and also to remember - to learn and recall , perhaps years later, a face, a tune, a poem or a telephone number. Are there m olecules of memory? Can we understand the brain best as a computer? What light d o diseases of memory shed on its mechanism? What is it, locked into the interact ions of the brain cells and the molecules composing them, that carries the memor ies which make each person unique? Deciphering this, Steven Rose argues, is the key to interpreting the links between brain and mind. In this book he traces the road to a new understanding of memory that he and other researchers have follow ed, with all its false turnings and misleading signposts. One of the aims of the book is to explore, through a description of the laboratory life of memory rese archers, how scientists, in a world not free from political rivalry, ideology an d self-deception, nevertheless strive to answer an important and fascinating que stion. The winner of the Rhone-Poulenc Science Prize 1993.…