Summary
Payel was particularly interested in reading this book because she knew the author, Lisa Genova, as a fiction writer. She wrote Still Alice in 2007, which was adapted to film in 2014 and won Julianne Moore an Academy Award for Best Actress. That story is also about memory, and explores a woman who suffers from early-onset Alzheimer's Disease. She also received her Ph.D. in neuroscience from Harvard and taught neuroanatomy for some time before focusing on writing.
The book is sort of an all-encompassing primer on memory but also seems to have a practical bent - with copious advice to students studying for exams and older adults who have worsening memories and are afraid whether their memory loss is normal or pathological. The book is broken up into three big sections. The first section is about remembering, the second section is about forgetting, and the third section is about environmental factors that help or hurt memory that we have at least some control over.
The first part about memory introduces the idea that "memory" actually contains many separable processes in the brain, and then each chapter introduces these different types of memory. We learn about the important role of attention in memory encoding. Then we learn about the working memory system, where short-term memories are stored in different perceptual systems before being converted to long-term memory. Then we learn about different types of long-term memory in the second half of the first section - which covers procedural memory (or muscle memory), and the two types of declarative memories - semantic memory (which are memories for facts and knowledge), and episodic memory (which is narrative memory about events).
The second section focuses on forgetting. She introduces the fallibility of episodic memory and how episodic memory is particularly susceptible to edits each time that it is remembered. She discusses the tip of the tongue phenomenon and problems with retrieval. She builds on the idea that she introduced in the first section about the importance of attention, and describes the distinction between forgetting something and never-having encoded something in the first place. And she focuses a bit on the role of distinctiveness and emotional content to "tag" things as important in attention to be remembered. More mundane things are forgotten more quickly. And she finishes the second section by discussing differences in normal age-related declines in memory, such as greater instances of the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon, and lapses that are more concerning of pathology like forgetting what a car is for.
The third section is the most self-help part of the book and tries to give tips about ways to have a little control over memories. She discusses how context cues matter a lot for remembering - because sensory context information reinforces the retrieval process. She discusses the negative effects of chronic stress on memory, the positive effects of sleep, and the good stuff you can do to reduce your risk of Alzheimer's Disease.
Discussion questions / notes:
- Do you think that the concept of an engram and memory are equivalent? An engram is the persisting physiological after-effects of experiences. Or does memory have to be revealed in thought? Or in behavior? Or does it need some combination? For instance, most people don't think that "I" remember something if I become dependent on another person or technology to store the memory. Even though, I don't really know a good way of separating depending on a calendar for remembering events as that different from depending on my cerebellum to remember how to not fall down when I walk around.
- I was not convinced by Genova's assertion that "You are not more likely to experience fewer TOTs (tip of the tongue), resolve future TOTs faster, better remember where you put your keys, remember to take your heart medication tonight, or prevent Alzheimer’s if you can retrieve Tony Soprano’s name without Google.” I don't know if I just missed it, but I didn't remember her providing any evidence for this, and since retrieval practice is generally seen as helpful to memory, it didn't seem right. What did you think about this?
- In the section on context, there was also a weird assertion that it would be better to take a test sleep-deprived if that's how you studied the material. Again, I don't think that particular study has been done, and it is an example of the kind of nuance that I thought was missing from the book. It seemed like there was little regard for the effect sizes of different environmental factors that help or hurt our memory. Do you agree or do you think she did a good providing sources when needed?
- For me, most of the information in the book is textbook psychology of memory, which I’ve spent a lot of time studying. Because of that, I don’t know what information in this book is “common knowledge” and what information is new and interesting. I'm curious if the members of this group had been exposed to most of this knowledge before, or if they learned a lot of new stuff, and what sorts of new things did you learn?
- One thing that wasn't addressed too much in the book, but I find is really fascinating is the effect of having learned something before on learning it again. It kind of goes back to my engram question. It's very clear that something is still in my brain, even though I might not consciously be able to recall any information about a topic. This happens to me most strikingly with piano. I'll play maybe two measures of something that I learned as a kid, but then I don't remember anymore. But if I just keep repeating it, like pounding a wall with a battering ram, eventually my fingers will play the next measure…and if I pound it some more, they'll keep going. It's super fascinating to me. We know from the book that the shift from hippocampal dependent memory to long-term memory stored in the cortex takes time, and I wonder if this phenomenon varies as a function of how "corticalized" the memory engram is. Have you had experiences like this?
- Ebbinghaus's memory curves were really interesting to me. These are the curves that show how quickly memories disappear when the memory is not recalled. I knew about these, but what I didn't know was that Ebbinghaus had done all the experiments just on himself at first. It was making me think that it's sort of surprising that self-experimentation isn't a more common thing to do. Most people look to studies of averaged measures in samples to gain some knowledge to guide their own behavior…which makes a lot of sense for things that are very long-term like knowing that smoking causes a higher probability of lung cancer. But also, people will read things that could be immediately testable, but they usually don't do the self-experiment. For example, I have no idea what my own Ebbinghaus curve looks like, and it is very probable that it doesn’t look exactly like Ebbinghaus’s.