In the Palaces of Memory : How We Build the Worlds Inside Our Heads

Rating:
Summary: Edifices: deliberate, fantasmagorical, neural
Review: "Whenever you read a book or have a conversation, the experience causes physical changes in your brain. In a matter of seconds, new circuits are formed, memories that can change forever the way you think about the world. [...] I'll never forgive David Lynch for his movie Erasorhead." The first two pages of In the Palaces of Memory introduce remembrance as an act not only of acquisition but of self-exposure. Memories make it possible for us to function; they may also lodge themselves in us "like a shard of glass healed inside a wound," never to be expelled. Some memories are desired and some become a part of the structure of our minds against our will.

Memory's palaces, though, may be as much the edifices the theorists construct as they are the ones inside our heads. This slim volume is not only an analysis of the way memory works but also an exposé of the way memory morphs depending on who's studying it. The underlying question, as in so much of Johnson's work, is really "how a theory matches up with some kind of real world," and what the world (in this case the brain) looks like from the point of view of the brain-children, scientific or philosophical, that purport to explain it. In this book the "unruly, creative art of theory-building" occupies center stage with memory.

What is remarkable about Johnson's writing is the uninhibited intimacy he seems to have with his subjects and with us, his readers, so that we can feel ourselves to be as close to the Thing, whatever it is, as he is. Johnson has granted me the delightful illusion of being nose to nose with a neuron, with Gell-Mann, with Planck's constant -- almost as though the experience were unmediated by an author. The man's a master story teller. But what comes across is also -- and here's the clincher -- a profound sense of amusement. If I'm not mistaken George Johnson is given to quiet chuckles in the dark over theoreticians and theorems. He infuses his translations of science in the making with a persistent, ironic-affectionate grin.

How can we resist.

Rating:
Summary: Edifices: deliberate, fantasmagorical, neural
Review: "Whenever you read a book or have a conversation, the experience causes physical changes in your brain. In a matter of seconds, new circuits are formed, memories that can change forever the way you think about the world. [...] I'll never forgive David Lynch for his movie Erasorhead." The first two pages of In the Palaces of Memory introduce remembrance as an act not only of acquisition but of self-exposure. Memories make it possible for us to function; they may also lodge themselves in us "like a shard of glass healed inside a wound," never to be expelled. Some memories are desired and some become a part of the structure of our minds against our will.

Memory's palaces, though, may be as much the edifices the theorists construct as they are the ones inside our heads. This slim volume is not only an analysis of the way memory works but also an exposé of the way memory morphs depending on who's studying it. The underlying question, as in so much of Johnson's work, is really "how a theory matches up with some kind of real world," and what the world (in this case the brain) looks like from the point of view of the brain-children, scientific or philosophical, that purport to explain it. In this book the "unruly, creative art of theory-building" occupies center stage with memory.

What is remarkable about Johnson's writing is the uninhibited intimacy he seems to have with his subjects and with us, his readers, so that we can feel ourselves to be as close to the Thing, whatever it is, as he is. Johnson has granted me the delightful illusion of being nose to nose with a neuron, with Gell-Mann, with Planck's constant -- almost as though the experience were unmediated by an author. The man's a master story teller. But what comes across is also -- and here's the clincher -- a profound sense of amusement. If I'm not mistaken George Johnson is given to quiet chuckles in the dark over theoreticians and theorems. He infuses his translations of science in the making with a persistent, ironic-affectionate grin.

How can we resist.

Rating:
Summary: "Fascinating" -- Nature ... "Rich and Lucid" -- James Gleick
Review:

"One of the last great mysteries is the one we carry inside our heads: how we remember, what we remember, why we remember. "In the Palaces of Memory" is a rich and lucid guide to this entangled and enchanting domain." -- James Gleick

"Johnson has written a fascinating book, which perhaps throws as much light on how science is done and on the scientists who do it as any book since "The Double Helix" -- Stuart Sutherland, Nature

"Johnson has achieved a rare blend of scientific and literary sophistication. Faithful to its complexities and controversies, the book is a fully dimensional portrait, a hologram of the field." -- Richard Mark Friedhoff, USA Today