Consciousness, Literature and the Arts

 

Archive

 

 

Volume 12 Number 3, December 2011

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Suzanne Nalbantian, Paul M. Matthews and James L. McClelland (Eds.) The Memory Process: Neuroscientific and Humanistic Perspectives

Cambridge, MA and London, England.  The MIT Press, 2011. 440 pages. ISBN: 978-0-262-01457-1; Hardback price: £25.95

 

Reviewed by

 

Susan Green

Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia

 

The Memory Process: Neuroscientific and Humanistic Perspectives is an important and exciting publication because of its convergence of perspectives from experts on memory from both the sciences and the arts. Merging traditionally distinct areas of scholarly inquiry through the common interest in memory, The Memory Process is representative of the growing commerce between the sciences and the humanities, and of the burgeoning interest in the mutually beneficial intersection between the sciences and the arts generally. In her introduction, Suzanne Nalbantian states that the book is “based on the conviction that the future for breakthroughs in memory research lies in a convergence of these two perspectives. The aim of the book is to forge key connections between the latest findings in scientific memory research and insights from various sectors in the humanities... on this timely subject” (1).

 

Consisting of nineteen essays, The Memory Process is structured evenly into five sub- sections: i Scientific Foundations; ii Scientific Phenomena and Functioning; iii Crossroads to the Humanities; iv Literary Data for Memory Studies; and v Manifestations in the Arts. Within these sub-sections the separate essays offer distinctly different insights into the complexity of memory, with the overt recognition that memory is a complicated, multifaceted phenomenon that is of intense interest to cognitive theorists today. In numerous different ways the writers offer important insights into the ways memories live within us, the ways the past is kept alive, continually shaping and emotionally affecting us. The Memory Process provokes us to think about the extent to which we may overlook memory – such a familiar part of our lives – as a remarkable feature of our lived experience, and to ask ourselves why exactly do memories affect us as they do?

 

The essays in the first two sections of The Memory Process offer detailed, empirically-sourced, yet accessible approaches to memory from varied scientific perspectives. For example, Yadin Dudai, in the first of the book’s five sections, uses the enormous amount of scientific data on brain mechanisms to explore the engram. Asking direct questions such as “what is [the engram’s] relevance to the expression of memory?” (29), Dudai considers the frailty of memory rather than its stability. Alcino J. Silva in his essay entitled “Molecular Genetic Approaches to Memory Consolidation” draws on studies in molecular and cellular cognition to “dramatically reconsider basic assumptions about memory process” (41). Arguing that memory is “about survival, not accuracy” (42), Silva explains that despite our memories seeming vivid and detailed typically what we remember is “neither exact nor rich in detail” (42). Other essays from the scientific approach to memory focus, for example, on brain plasticity; memory involved in our sleep and our dreams; memory disorders; and emotional memory.

 

Section iii comprises three essays from philosophers – John Bickle, William Hirstein and Walter Glannon – which function in this book to help bridge the commonly perceived divide between science and the arts and, also, to illuminate the multiple productive angles from which memory can be investigated. For example, William Hirstein’s important essay “Confabulations about Personal Memories, Normal and Abnormal” provides an intriguing exploration of the capacity of all human beings – both healthy and unhealthy – to confabulate or invent false narratives. Hirstein advocates the combining of the work of psychologists, neuroscientists and philosophers in the effort to fully understand confabulation. Acknowledging that memory is “a selective and reconstructive process” (223), Hirstein explains that memory can easily go wrong and that “confabulation may be telling us something important about the human mind and about human nature” (230).

 

Sections iv and v of The Memory Process focus on the ways we can explore and understand the memory process from the perspective of the arts. Memory is investigated here through a focus on autobiographical writing, literary fiction and plays, as well as the visual arts, music and film. Suzanne Nalbantian, in her essay “Autobiographical Memory in Modernist Literature and Neuroscience”, argues that modernist autobiographical literature such as that by Woolf, Joyce, Proust and Faulkner, can be used as a “laboratory for the study of the encoding, storage, and retrieval of episodic memory” (255), and that their works “provide a new kind of empirical data for understanding memory in its phenomenological expressions” (255). Nalbantian’s interdisciplinary analysis firmly positions literature as a central contributor to the understanding of autobiographical memory because it provides evidence of subjective experiences in a way denied to scientific discourse. Alan Richardson explores the connections between memory and the imagination and links the work of Romantic-era writers such as Coleridge, Wordsworth and Austen and their theories of the imagination, with recent work in the cognitive neurosciences which suggests that “remembering the past and imagining the future may in fact be closely related functions of a single cognitive system” (277). In a manner similar to Nalbantian, Richardson advocates the use of fiction by scientists in their investigations of self-projection. His essay finishes with this strong assertion: “Now that neuroscientific researchers on memory have begun broaching issues of fiction and imagination, active interdisciplinary collaboration with literary scholars and theorists seems less a collegial gesture of goodwill that a necessary next step” (292).

 

A final example of the vast array of approaches to memory from a humanities perspective is that of Attilio Favorini’s “Memory in Theatre: The Scene is Memory”. Arguing that the correspondences between the way science understands memory and the constructions of dramatists have “gone completely unnoticed” (315), this excellent essay pairs well-known works of Henrik Ibsen, Tennessee Williams and Samuel Beckett, with Sigmund Freud, cognitive psychologist Jerome Bruner, and neuroscientist Gerald Edelman. There are also references to the “memory-suffused” (317) works of Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Pericles. Citing the use of theatrical conceptual metaphors by scientists such as Edelman: “the world can be correlated and bound into a scene... a spatiotemporally ordered set of categorizations of familiar and unfamiliar events” (318), Favorini makes a convincing case for memory plays as ideal vehicles to communicate past and present, changing and evolving selves.

 

The Memory Process contains a rich variety of approaches reflecting the common endeavour to better understand the phenomenon of memory. This book is an important new publication because of the unusual cross-disciplinary fusion of works of memory and will no doubt significantly contribute to the way memory studies are pursued.