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

Popular posts from this blog

Review 5: Gulp - Adventures on the Alimentary Canal by Mary Roach

When it comes to the works of Mary Roach, this ain’t my first Roach-eo - I’ve previously read and been entranced by Stiff , her foray into the world of corpses. But I still wasn’t expecting to like this book quite so much as I did. It’s one of the most enjoyable reads I’ve had for a long time. Gulp is a hotchpotch journey down the alimentary canal - the big vacuum cleaner bag that runs from our mouths to our exit wounds. Roach isn’t writing a medical textbook here though. She follows the stories of things that sound interesting, or gross, or (regularly) both, so you end up with quite a lot of stuff that’s tangentially-related rather than a tube-by-tube account of your inner passages. And that’s all for the betterment of the book. Here are a few facts and amusing asides I noted down during reading: Fabric softener works by slightly digesting the fibres of your clothes, using the same enzymes as in your guts. Painting restoration workers often spit on swabs to take layers...

Review 4: I Love Dick by Chris Kraus

I Love Dick is a book whose title feels like a deliberate trick to make you aware of other people looking at you when reading it on a train. I’m certain that it will have been a publishing decision to catch the eye. I look forward to seeing the same publisher’s follow-up hits, Eat All Puppies and I’m Not Racist, But… Publishing chicanery aside, ILD is, in its through-line, about a woman who develops a mostly one-sided infatuation with a man called Dick (get it? The title was a phallusy). But it’s an indirect plotline, with plenty of other ruminations about gender, art, politics and more thrown in too. “Plotline” may not be quite the correct term to use, given that the basis for the book is essentially autobiographical, and it reads like a memoir in the clothes of literature – or possibly the other way around. You’re certainly aware that these are real people being discussed, none more so than the author, Chris Kraus, who brings her whole self to bear on the page, with all the m...

Review 33: The Veiled Woman by Anaïs Nin

Okay, so it’s basically my own fault for not properly researching what I was reading. I knew of Anaïs Nin as a writer of fiction and essays, so when I picked up this slim volume of short stories, I thought little of it. But as it turns out, she also wrote erotic literature. I’ve reviewed quite a few graphic novels during this 100 Book Year, but this is my first set of graphic short stories. And by graphic , I don’t mean it has pictures. I took this to read this on the train, and as my misconception became clearer, found myself regularly glancing anxiously at the woman next to me in case she could read the content of the page I was on and now considered me a Public Transport Pervert. It’s important to consider these stories in their proper context. Nin, a complex and controversial character, wrote mostly in the 1940s within a circle of mostly-male literary elite, and sought to find her place at the lead of it. She’s widely considered ground-breaking in the West as a woman writ...