The Making Of Memory

Combining a richly detailed account of scientists at work with a highly readable explanation of cutting-edge neuroscience, this book offers fascinating new insights on the cellular mechanisms of memory and learning.

Steven Rose's The Making of Memory is about just that, in both its senses: the biological processes by which we humans - and other animals - learn and remember, and how researchers can explore these mechanisms. But it is also about much more. When the first edition of this fascinating book won the Science book Prize in 1993, the judges described it as 'a riveting read...a first-hand account by a practicing scientist working at the forefront of medical research and Rose does not duck the issues which that raises.' Now ten years on, research has itself moved forward, and Rose has taken the opportunity to fully revise the book. But this is more than mere revision. Where ten years ago he argued the case for research on memory because it is the most extraordinary of human attributes, Rose's own research has now opened the doors to a potential new treatment for Alzheimer's Disease undreamed of a decade ago, and in an entirely new chapter he describes how this potential breakthrough has occurred.

Memories come in many different forms and vary substantially in strength; some, such as where you put your car keys, can be brief, while others remain in the mind forever. James McGaugh, a leading neurobiologist, provides an accessible and thought-provoking look at how we remember and why we forget. Beginning with the first scientific studies of learning and ending with the latest cutting-edge research, he explores how memories are made and preserved; why some experiences fade and disappear with time; how stress hormones effect the consolidation of memory; whether drugs would improve our ability to learn; and what studies of extraordinary memories and disorders tell us about the workings of the brain systems involved in memory formation.

Making Memory Books and Journals by Hand offers easy-to-follow instructions for more than thirty projects that connect and preserve life's important occasions and friendships. Readers will learn how to make personalized photo albums, travel diaries, wedding albums, portfolios, and dream catcher booklets using creative studio techniques such as wax resist, leaf printing, and plaster paper. The writer in each of us will delight in learning how to hand-craft daily journals of all kinds, including garden, art, and recipe logs. An appealing and approachable guide, this book will help any reader transform a jumble of snapshots and notes into a beautiful collection of our most cherished moments.

This innovative new book examines the ways in which writers’ houses contribute to the making of memory. It shows that houses built or inhabited by poets and novelists both reflect and construct the author’s private and artistic persona; it also demonstrates how this materialized process of self-fashioning is subsequently appropriated within various strategies and policies of cultural memory.

Mary Carruthers's classic study of the training and uses of memory for a variety of purposes in European cultures during the Middle Ages has fundamentally changed the way scholars understand medieval culture. This fully revised and updated second edition considers afresh all the material and conclusions of the first. While responding to new directions in research inspired by the original, this new edition devotes much more attention to the role of trained memory in composition, whether of literature, music, architecture, or manuscript books. The new edition will reignite the debate on memory in medieval studies and, like the first, will be essential reading for scholars of history, music, the arts and literature, as well as those interested in issues of orality and literacy (anthropology), in the working and design of memory (both neuropsychology and artificial memory), and in the disciplines of meditation (religion).

Social media platforms hold vast amounts of data about our lives. Content from the past is increasingly being presented in the form of ‘memories’. Critically exploring this new form of memory making, this unique book asks how social media are beginning to change the way we remember.

Nations as well as individuals are in many ways the sum of their memories, which are shaped by perception as much as by events. This collection of essays by South African academics looks at the ways the country is dealing with its past, a complex mixture of colonialism, slavery, apartheid,struggle, and guilt. The emphasis is on how that past is being perceived and moulded in the post-apartheid era.