Psychologists have been interested in human memory for centuries and useful memory aids have been around for as long. It is an amazing facility and works astonishingly well for much of the time. Julia Shaw takes us around the brain and shows how memories are formed. Whatever we say to the contrary she makes it plain that we can’t remember anything before about 2-3 years, it is impossible to remember our birth. It is possible, though, to create an imaginary and convincing scenario of that event. She draws on research from the last few decades to demonstrate how memory is not infallible and can be tampered with or just get muddled. She spends a lot of time in creating false memories so that people become convinced that they experienced events that never actually happened to them. She shows that eyewitness testimony can easily be mistaken or altered and has a special warning for those who investigate crimes. Well meaning but ill informed investigators can easily mislead people they interview. She also found that erroneous beliefs, such as thinking that memory is like a video tape, are held by many people including some police officers. Social media can affect our memories nowadays and overall our memories are limited or shaped by what we are interested in and pay attention to. Rightly, to my mind, she criticises the expression False Memory Syndrome but although there is no such syndrome she makes it clear that there are false memories and memory science has proved this beyond doubt. In the memory wars Shaw is very much against Freud and his theory of repression of sexual abuse as the cause of mental health problems. His patients had no memories of such events but their denial confirmed to Freud that he was right! Apparently, the Nobel committee dismissed Freud’s ideas as having no scientific value. ‘Unfortunately, although they have all been discredited, Freud’s assumptions about memory repression, the subconscious and retrieval therapy are all still represented in a subset of the therapeutic population.’ [Shaw, Julia. The Memory Illusion: Remembering, Forgetting, and the Science of False Memory (Kindle Locations 3409-3410). Random House. Kindle Edition.] She did not include the idea of ‘body memories’ which has become popular in some circles but I expect that she would give it short shrift because the brain is the repository of memory.
Shaw includes many examples drawn from recent research, from her experiments and from everyday life. She debunks claims that memory can be improved while we are asleep and has little use for gizmos that are said to improve early learning. Altogether we have to be realistic about memory but it is not all bad news and she finishes with a chapter on how to use our memories well with the help of mnemonics and similar memory aids.
There is much more. All I can say is that this is an important, popularly written, book and should be read widely, especially by those involved in investigations. That would include psychologists, psychotherapists and counsellors, detectives and lawyers. And since many people are likely to serve on a jury it is definitely a book for the general public to read and absorb. A bibliography or suggestions for further reading would have been helpful. The Kindle edition worked well except for the Index which has no links to the locations. The best way round this is to use the search facility.
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Top reviews from other countries
José Macaya
Libro interesante pero inquietante
Reviewed in Spain on 15 September 2021
Un lecteur passionné
Tout ce qu'il faut savoir sur le fonctionnement de la mémoire
Reviewed in France on 7 January 2018Gary C.
It provides a great overview of the science of memory and for me ...
Reviewed in the United States on 7 February 2017
