Why Life Speeds Up As You Get Older: How Memory Shapes our Past [Paperback]

Douwe Draaisma (Author), Arnold Pomerans (Translator), Erica Pomerans (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 18, 2006

Is it true, as the novelist Cees Nooteboom once wrote, that memory is like a dog that lies down where it pleases? Where do the long, lazy summers of our childhood go? Why, as we grow older, does time seem to condense, speed up and elude us, while in old age, significant events from our distant past can seem as vivid and real as what happened yesterday? Douwe Draaisma, author of the internationally acclaimed Metaphors of Memory (Cambridge, 2001), explores the nature of autobiographical memory. Applying a unique blend of scholarship, poetic sensibility, and keen observation, he tackles such extraordinary phenomena as deja-vu, near-death experiences, the memory feats of idiot savants, and the effects of extreme trauma on memory recall. Raising almost as many questions as it answers, this fascinating book will not fail to affect you at the same time as it educates and entertains. Douwe Draaisma is Professor of the History of Psychology in the Department of Theory and History of Psychology at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands. He has published books on time and memory and his articles have appeared in professional journals as diverse as Annals of Science, Psychological Medicine, and Nature. The original Dutch version of Why Life Speeds Up As You Get Older has won several scientific and literary awards.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Draaisma...is a terrific writer, whose erudition and passion for the topic are apparent in every page."
--Nature Magazine


"This is a provacative and well-written book."
--Desert Morning News


"Douwe Draaisma's Why Life Speeds Up As You Get Older won prizes when it appeared in Dutch, and is a treasure. The result is informative, amusing and moving. Long after you close it, it leaves a good memory."
--New Scientist, Jon Turney


"...expertly and fluidly integrates applied autobiographical memory topics with interesting historical and contemporary vignettes of the psychology research literature. Excellent supplementary reading for courses in cognitive psychology and the history of psychology, highly recommended."
--CHOICE


"Douwe Draaisma has written a delightful book about some intriguing aspects of memory...We applaud Draaisma's identification of hard-to-reach places and hope that this book will challenge experimental psychologists to develop new methodologies."
--PsycCritiques, Elizabeth J. Marsh, Lisa K. Fazio


"In this remarkable volume, our hope of understanding the impact of time upon memory is amply met. Douwe Draaisma, an academic psychologist in the Netherlands, has organized a compelling and thorough review of studies in memory. These studies are offered to the reader in understandable terms, thanks to both the author's clarity of presentation and to the skill of the translators, Arnold and Erica Pomerans."
--Philip W. Brickner, MD

Book Description

Where do the long, lazy summers of our childhood go? Why is it that as we grow older time seems to condense, speed up, elude us while in old age significant events from our distant past can seem as vivid and real as what happened yesterday? In this enchanting and thoughtful book, Douwe Draaisma, author of the internationally acclaimed "Metaphors of Memory", explores the nature of autobiographical memory and extraordinary phenomena such as deja-vu the memory feats of idiot-savants or the effects of extreme trauma on memory recall.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press; 1 edition (September 18, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0521691990
• ISBN-13: 978-0521691994
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.1 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #146,244 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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48 of 50 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Evaluation of Our Real Memories, February 25, 2005

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R. Hardy "Rob Hardy" (Columbus, Mississippi USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Why Life Speeds Up As You Get Older: How Memory Shapes our Past (Hardcover)

Every psychiatrist has some quick tests to check on how your memory is working: reciting digits forward and backward, recalling the presidents sequentially, remembering three objects after three minutes, and so on. Such functions of memory are important, but they are not what we think of as real, personal memory, the subjective recall of what has gone on in our lives, the family reunions, childhood joys and traumas, successive homes, and so on. These stored personal experiences form our "autobiographical memory." It has only been known as such for about twenty years, basically because the other types of memory (like digit recall) have been more easily subject to psychological testing. The autobiographical memory is the main subject of essays in _Why Life Speeds Up as You Get Older: How Memory Shapes Our Past_ (Cambridge University Press) by Douwe Draaisma (translated from the Dutch by Arnold and Erica Pomerans). There are surprisingly few hard answers in this book. In writing about the near-death experience, for instance, Draaisma says that examining the hypotheses that might explain it makes clear that "... all they amount to is a handful of conjectures, a few statistical links and suggestive analogies." Nonetheless, our autobiographical memories are such an integral part of ourselves that it is fascinating to learn how scientists have been trying to explain just how this vital part of personality operates, and how much of the memory capacity that we take for granted is still mysterious and beyond even initial probes.

To start with, despite the book's title which is taken from just one of its chapters, there is not a fully accepted reason for older people to think that life is going faster for them than it did when they were younger. William James himself in 1890 explained that in youth, there were novel experiences, something new every day, but every passing year brought routine which smoothed the days, weeks, and years into a collapse of time. A period full of memories, viewed in retrospect, seems to expand and be fuller and longer. There is a chapter to examine the universal phenomenon that that none of us remember our earliest year or two, not at all. "We shall have to wait and see if our life ends with memory loss," Draaisma writes, "what is certain is that it starts with it." We did have working memories at the time; we were adding buckets of words to our vocabularies, and we had a daily capacity of remembering our relatives, our pets, our routines. A possible explanation for the veil drawn over the first years of memory is that the child has yet to develop full consciousness; if there is no "I" within, there can be no autobiographical memory.

As befits an expert writing for laymen, Draaisma writes powerfully using comparisons. In discussing the "tip of the tongue" phenomenon, where you remember you know something but cannot remember the thing itself, he writes that there is something that has stayed back in the memory, "something like the discoloured patch on the wall whose outlines tell you what used to hang there for years." There is a good range of chapters here to cover aspects of an appealing subject, including the memory and calculating power of so-called idiot savants, the "flashbulb memory" that enables us to tell exactly (or maybe not) what we were doing when we heard of an earth-shattering event like the 9/11 attacks, the scientific evaluation of déjà vu, the examination of why smells can produce such evocative memories, a checkers grandmaster explaining (or being unable to explain) how he plays multiple blindfold games simultaneously, and why we remember humiliating memories so clearly and permanently. It is fascinating that with such tools as brain scans, we are getting closer to understanding how the mind works, but the memory we take for granted every day has barely begun to yield its secrets.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Lots of really interesting stuff about memory, August 13, 2008

By 

Ronald van Vollenhoven (Sweden) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Why Life Speeds Up As You Get Older: How Memory Shapes our Past (Paperback)

Draaisma, a professor of psychology in the Netherlands, is a highly regarded scientist who has devoted his professional life to studying memories, but he is also a good and entertaining writer. So when he sets out in each of the essays in this book to highlight one of the many fascinating aspects of memory, you are garanteed to get a good read. The title of the book is just one of the very interesting and thought-provoking subjects he touches upon (and in case you wonder: no, there is no one clear answer to that question). A little surprise in the book comes when Draaisma switches gears and writes very eloquently about certain historical events during WWII - which then leads on to legal issues and the reliability of memories in court.

The original Dutch-language version of this book gets 5 stars from me, hands down. The English translation loses a bit of the spontaneity and entusiasm that Draaisma conveys in the original, but if you're not planning on learning Dutch, and you do have an interest in memory, then you will enjoy this book a lot.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars What near-death experiences can tell us to boost our memory, June 25, 2009

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Emre Sevinc "Software Developer, Cognitive Sc... (Antwerp, Belgium) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Why Life Speeds Up As You Get Older: How Memory Shapes our Past (Paperback)

The question in the title of the book is tackled only towards the end very briefly but that doesn't render the book irrelevant. On the contrary, it is a unique blend of historical perspective on the psychology of memory and literature. Even though the text is generally relaxed and targeted toward the casual interested reader it provides good references on memory studies. Especially the chapter on near-death experiences provide some good and competing hypotheses which try to link the data to what we currently know about brain.

What struck me most and took me by surprise was a passage related to the metaphor of 'viewing one's whole life as a film in fast motion'. The author showed that long before the invention of cinema the metaphor of 'panorama' was used for that kind of near-death experiences however now that the cinema is so much established everybody who had that kind of dramatic experience refers to what happened in terms of cinema and this may be leading to the loss of some details which cannot be expressed in the language of cinema (such as seeing different part of life, of memory all at once, which is possible in the panorama metaphor but not so using the metaphor of cinema).