Searching For Memory: The Brain, The Mind, And The Past [Paperback]

Daniel L. Schacter (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 2, 1997

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.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com 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. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

Schacter, a Harvard psychology professor, has produced a full, rich picture of how human memory works, an elegant, captivating tour de force that interweaves the latest research in cognitive psychology and neuroscience with case materials and examples from everyday life. Clinical studies of brain-damaged and amnesiac patients reinforce his thesis that memory is not a single faculty, as was long assumed, but instead depends on a variety of systems, each tied to a particular network of brain structures, all acting in concert so we recognize objects, acquire habits, hold information for brief periods, retain concepts and recollect specific events. Aided by numerous reproductions of contemporary paintings that evoke the subjective workings of memory, Schacter explores how we convert fragmentary remains of experience into autobiographical narratives. Implicit memory, at work even when we are unable to fully recall recent events, pervasively, unconsciously colors our perceptions, judgments, feelings and behavior, he maintains. Chapters also cover distortion in memory, repressed memory of childhood sexual abuse, recollection of extreme trauma and memory impairment with aging. This wonderfully enlightening survey enlarges our understanding of the mind's potential.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 416 pages
• Publisher: Basic Books (May 2, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0465075525
• ISBN-13: 978-0465075522
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.3 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #38,916 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #33 in Books > Self-Help > Memory Improvement

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

29 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A remarkable book., April 27, 1997

By A Customer

This review is from: Searching For Memory: The Brain, The Mind, And The Past (Hardcover)

Your memory is certainly the most crucial aspect of who you are. Without it, arguably at least, consciousness itself borders on irrelevance, and identity no longer exists. Most of us think of memory, metaphorically, as shining a spotlight on images, sounds, and emotions from our past. Reading Daniel Schacter's fascinating text, Searching for Memory, The Brain, the Mind, and the Past, I realized just how deceptive and simplistic that notion is. In fact, every time you speak, or write something, or read, or drive a car, you're calling on "procedural" memory which allows you to learn skills and acquire habits, and/or "semantic" memory, which includes conceptual and factual knowledge. Even the spotlight-type memories you do have can be divided into "field" memories, which mimic your perceptions at the time of the original experience, and "observer" memories, which where you actually see yourself from the outside. (The latter is common when recalling early-childhood experiences.) Searching for Memory is beautifully written, and teeming with stories and anecdotes that illustrate the nature of memory in a way that makes the absorption of its insights effortless. My only complaint about this book is that my wife kept trying to read it over my shoulder. If you're married, I suggest you order two copies

28 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Explains how memory works and how it fails, June 12, 2000

By 

Juergen Kahrs (Bremen, Germany) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Searching For Memory: The Brain, The Mind, And The Past (Paperback)

The title of this book is not very helpful in understanding what this book is about. There is a translation of Schacter's book (ISBN 3498063243) in German titled "Wir sind Erinnerung", meaning "we are recollections". These three words sum up the essence of the whole book much better than the original title. Really.

Schacter seems to be one of the leading scientists in the field of research on memory. He coined several technical terms of the field and built theories about how humans remember, what they remember and how they fail to remember. This book is a summary of Schacter's work over the period 1980 to 1995 in plain words. While the main text uses very few technical terms, there are many many references to scientific papers. The Notes section stretches over 40 pages, the bibliography covers 35 pages, and the index is excellent. All in all a well written book about a scientific subject.

If you are a scientist in the field, this book is not for you. You should read scientific papers instead of reading 400 pages of a paperback book. There are some other things I do not like about this book (which others seem to like). Schacter often refers to paintings of artists which are reproduced (in black and white, no colour) in the book. These pictures illustrate the way some artists feel about several aspects of memorizing. Well, I am not interested in such poor black and white reproductions, but perhaps you like it. Another annoying feature of this book is that there is often too much story telling in it. I would have liked more conciseness and precision instead of the many many cases a clinician sees through his career. Anyway, it was good enough to keep me reading it from the first to the last page.

22 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Cognitive psychology of memory, March 13, 2002

By 

Carlos Camara "marrorris2" (Monterrey, Mexico) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Searching For Memory: The Brain, The Mind, And The Past (Paperback)

this is the best review of the cognitive psychology of memory, by one of the leading experts in the field. I personally did not enjoy the artistic aspest of the book, but many say it was complementing. Now there are much better cognitive neuroscience books on memory -Kandel and Squires books, Steven Roses, among others- but as for the psychological aspects, this book stands above all others. At times it reads too much like a collection of case studies, but few would deny that lesion studies have contribuited a lot to an understanding of the brain/mind.
Most of the memory field is covered: recogntion vs. recall, implicit vs. explicit, episodic vs. procedural, short -long term, working memory, genral,emotional, semantic, etc..... but there is also a welcome and thorough discussion of false and recovered memories. In no other field can one see better the imediateimpact that cognitive psychology of memory has on legal and social issues. Schacter effectively explains everything we know about the phenomenon. As for the other themes, adequate and sufficient reviews are given. I personally would have liked a bit more of neuroscience, but it is a great read nontheless. There is also not much mention of the relationship between memory and other higher cognitive processes, like consciousness (a good place for speculation) or attention. But Schacter sticks to what is known, and does it well.
AS an introduction to any aspect of memory studies, few texts are better than this one. But I would tell anyone interested to also read other Schacter books, as well as more pure psychology and neurological texts on the subject. (see Seven Sins of Memory by the same author, Kandel and Squires Memory:from Minds to Molecules and Roses The Making of Memory among others).