Memory's Voice: Deciphering the Mind-Brain Code

One of America's leading brain researchers conducts a dazzling exploration of the brain and its ability to remember. "A rich telling of the search for how the brain remembers, one of the most exciting stories now unfolding in the scientific world."--Psychology Today. Photos and drawings.

In his 25-year search for memory sites in the brain, Alkon has been driven by a personal motive. His friend Michelle, brutally beaten by her father as a child, succumbed to schizophrenia and then committed suicide. How, Aikon wondered, does trauma exert its hold on the human psyche? In this interesting if overwritten scientific odyssey, the author, a brain researcher and doctor affiliated with the National Institutes of Health and with the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass., reports that he mapped learning networks in snails and built a computer-based artificial network capable of memory storage and pattern recognition. His intriguing thesis is that a traumatic experience, like a familiar sensory pattern, uses the brain to complete and reproduce itself. He further speculates that psychological dependence and addiction are rooted in the physiology of conditioning. Illustrated.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.