Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 16 Number 1, April 2015
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Forgetting: myths, perils and compensations. Douwe Draaisma, translated by Liz Waters. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015. 263 pp. ISBN 978-0-300-20728-6 (softcover).
Reviewed by
Valparaiso University
This book challenges the reader to consider one of the fundamental questions of the human mind: why is it we spend so much time remembering, and never develop techniques for forgetting? Our society has spent much time and research on combating and finding cures for diseases such as Alzheimers, which causes its sufferers to lose memory. What about the issues surrounding forgetting, and why is it not more discussed or examined by society in general? The author raises some intriguing questions on this topic, while providing case studies, stories, and research on why forgetting can be both a blessing and a curse. Some interesting questions the author poses in his Introduction include: Why do we have such a poor memory for dreams? What has gone wrong in the brain of someone who cannot remember faces? What is the fate of repressed memories, and do they actually exist? Why might a colleague remember your idea but forget it was yours?
The author provides a number of parameters for how the book is organized. The first parameter centers around autobiographical memory, especially early childhood and why it is so difficult to remember our early years. What research has shown is that the emergence of language and self-consciousness helps the memory to develop, but at the same time causes the brain to erase any earlier events. The next topic, dreams, goes deep into the paradigm of reverse chronological remembering: for some reason, final dream sequences are more often remembered than the dream itself, and the process of remembering has to do with thinking backwards in time.
The second parameter focuses on case studies, the first one on the case of Henry Molaison, or Henry M. as the scientific community called him. In 1953 at age 27, Henry had radical brain surgery that removed a large portion of his hippocampus, due to intense epileptic fits, thus curing his condition but making him lose the ability to form memories. The damage resulted in a life of living experiences in thirty second experiences, with no short- or long-term memory, which made him the perfect participant for brain and memory experiments, which he was always happy to be a part of. Henry M. became the most famous post-war neuropsychology experimental subject, having over 12,000 scientific articles written about him. When he died in 2008, his brain was sliced into 2,401 pieces to assemble a virtual online brain for research purposes. Chapter 3 is a remarkable homage to Henry M., his life, and his contributions to brain and memory research. Chapter 4 contains another case study on “soldier S,” who suffered a serious injury to his occipital lobe in March 1944 on the German front line. He could no longer remember faces, nor could he recognize familiar faces. He could not recognize his mother when he walked by her in the street, nor could he recognize his own face in a mirror. “Soldier S” was instrumental in the understanding of “face blindness,” the disorder known as prosopagnosia, which is now being found more common than previously thought. Chapter 5 is a case study of Korsakoff’s syndrome, which affects both past and present memory, thereby making the patient an invalid. One experiment involved a Professor Z., who wrote his autobiography before being diagnosed with Korsakoff’s syndrome, and shows the depth and ultimate memory loss that this syndrome causes. Professor Z. had huge lacunae in his recent memory, as well as his semantic memory, indicating that this syndrome is like a slope followed by an abyss in its effect on the brain. Chapter 6 deals with cryptomnesia or unconscious plagiarism, whereby original ideas one has heard from somewhere else or read somewhere become that person’s original idea.
The third parameter circles around the historical and recent theories on forgetting, from Arthur Wigan’s nineteenth-century theories on halves of the brain that Freud would later borrow for his conscious and unconscious minds theory, to theories on repression and the myth of total recall, to Peter Esterhazy’s embarrassing interpretations of his childhood and the memories surrounding it, to the fact that we photograph memories because we don’t want to forget events and people (even though they are burned into our minds already). The author concludes with thoughts regarding how we try to capture our lives and our individual essence before we die in any number of ways, and find comfort from the thought that our loved ones will not forget us (known as the “second death”). What technique or techniques that there are for forgetting do not exist, although there are those who wish that they were readily available, and just as many who are happy that there are none to access or try out.
I found this book intriguing in its flow and mixing of thought processes, case studies, and clinical and psychological research. Those who have a relative with Alzheimer’s disease, who have found themselves confronted with memory loss either personally or with others, and those who study and research the psychology and inner workings of the brain and mind will find this book a fascinating read.