Skip to main content

Review 17: The Memory Illusion: Remembering, Forgetting, and the Science of False Memory by Dr. Julia Shaw

The Memory Illusion: Remembering, Forgetting, and the Science of False Memory
You meet a lot of people with tremendous faith in their memories. I remember it like it was yesterday, or sure, I have a photographic memory, they’ll say, confidence rolling off them like arrogant petrol fumes. So for me, as someone who is constantly in a state of confusion and anti-clarity, it’s something of a relief to read Dr. Julia Shaw’s The Memory Illusion and see that they’re full of it. And by it, I don’t mean objectively accurate memories. I mean the other it.

Most of us are fairly comfortable with the idea that our memories are often imperfect. Or rather, we tend to be fairly comfortable with the idea that other people’s memories are imperfect, while rarely doubting our own. This is why, as part of Shaw’s whirlwind tour of memory and its flaws, she introduces the concept of asymmetric insight: the fact that we think that we understand other people better than they could possibly understand us. It ties into something of a superiority complex that we have – we implicitly trust our own experiences far more than we ought to. In fact, if you care to study my favourite ever diagram, you’ll see that our pink brainmeat is absolutely loaded with cognitive biases – and memory is no exception.

In fact, it seems that memory is faulty at pretty much every opportunity. From the point when we first create them – since our attentions are distracted from capturing accurate details – to remembering them, when we essentially rebuild the memories afresh and, in doing so, imbue them with extra layers of inaccuracy depending on our feelings at the time, we are building in flaws whenever we can. The takeaway from the book is really this: almost no memory anyone has ever had has been completely accurate.

Shaw’s writing is zippy and fun, particularly if you have a leaning towards scientific writing. Where it threatens to get a little dry, she breaks it up into handy sub-sections so that you’re not overloaded all in one go. That’s helpful, because this is the sort of book that you want to put down for a bit to consider the ramifications it has for your approach to your own memory.

I feel like the book could actually stand to be longer, and go more in-depth into some areas. But this is a popular science book, not a textbook, so it’s understandable that she’s kept it light.

There is one other key takeaway from the book: your memory isn’t perfect. Don’t rely on it. If in doubt – write it down. And that excellent advice, if nothing else, is something I absolutely will remember.

--

This is my seventeenth book review of 100 to raise money for Refuge, the domestic abuse charity. If you liked this review, or just want to help out, please donate on the link below!

JustGiving - Sponsor me now!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Review 1: Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall, by Anna Funder

My rating: 5 of 5 stars I am hungover and steer myself like a car through the crowds at Alexanderplatz station. How could you not love a book that begins like that? Early on in Stasiland , Anna Funder discusses the ‘puzzle women of Nuremberg’. This is a group of underfunded people (both men and women, oddly) who spend their days piecing together the scraps of documents the Stasi hurriedly shredded at the end of their regime. It feels like an apt analogy for Funder’s book itself – she carefully and brilliantly pieces together a view of what it was like to live in East Germany, and the effect it’s had on its citizens decades after the Berlin Wall was wrenched down, from snapshot interviews, research and her own experiences… despite the fact that most people she encounters would rather sweep it under the rug and pretend it never happened. I came to this book knowing that East Germany was run as a Communist surveillance state, but little else. That was no problem. ...
1 comment
Read more

Review 34: The Long Song by Andrea Levy

I’ve read a few books dealing with black slavery as part of this challenge. It’s interesting how each one looks at it through a slightly different lens, adding slightly different perspectives to the whole picture. In The Long Song , the thing that rings as much through the book as the horror and inhumanity of slavery is the sense of humour between the slaves themselves. It felt odd to laugh out loud while reading this, but there are plenty of times I did. I guess that this in itself is important – humour is an essential and universal human trait, so if we deny the slaves’ humour in recounting their stories, maybe it’s another way of denying their humanity all over again. I tried rewriting this about five times to make me sound less like a pseudo-intellectual jerksack, but this is the best I could do, I’m afraid. Anyway, TLS is set in a Jamaican sugar plantation in the early 19th century, and spans the periods just before and after slavery was abolished in the British Empir...
Post a Comment
Read more

Review 9: The Portable Veblen by Elizabeth McKenzie

The Portable Veblen is an odd read, and possibly not in the ways you’d expect. Picking it up, I assumed it was some sort of sci-fi or magic realist novel. Was a Veblen some sort of futuristic gun? A translation device? A highly treatable but somewhat embarrassing rash? In fact, as with so much in this world, it really only serves to highlight my troglodyte-level ignorance. Apparently Veblen is a reference to Thorstein Veblen, a Norwegian socialist and sociologist living in America in the late 1800s. He essentially decried capitalism and proposed an alternative system to Marxism, and it is after this prominent thinker that TPV ’s main character, Veblen, is named. For me, the novel is really about contradictions between people and between families as they try to adjust from being purely individual to being part of a wider group. How do you decide what to compromise on and what to retain? What is an unhealthy hangover from your upbringing and what is a genuinely core part of ...
Post a Comment
Read more