Pieces of Light: How the New Science of Memory Illuminates the Stories We Tell About Our Pasts

Written by Charles Fernyhough

Narrated by Gildart Jackson

How is it possible to have vivid memories of something that never happened?

How can siblings remember the same event from their childhoods so differently?

Do the selections and distortions of memory reveal a truth about the self?

Why are certain memories tied to specific places?

Does your memory really get worse as you get older?

A new consensus is emerging among cognitive scientists: rather than possessing fixed, unchanging memories, we create recollections anew each time we are called upon to remember. As the psychologist Charles Fernyhough explains, remembering is an act of narrative imagination as much as it is the product of a neurological process. In Pieces of Light, he eloquently illuminates this compelling scientific breakthrough via a series of personal stories—a visit to his college campus to see if his memories hold up, an interview with his ninety-three-year-old grandmother, conversations with those whose memories are affected by brain damage and trauma—each illustrating memory's complex synergy of cognitive and neurological functions.

Fernyhough guides readers through the fascinating new science of autobiographical memory, covering topics including imagination and the power of sense associations to cue remembering. Exquisitely written and meticulously researched, Pieces of Light brings together science and literature, the ordinary and the extraordinary, to help us better understand the ways we remember—and the ways we forget.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperAudio
• Release date: Mar 19, 2013
• ISBN: 9780062263384

Charles Fernyhough

Charles Fernyhough is the author of two novels, The Auctioneer (Fourth Estate), and A Box of Birds (Unbound), and has contributed to the Guardian, TIME Ideas, Sunday Telegraph, Financial Times, Sydney Morning Herald, and Focus Magazine. He has published many scientific articles on the relation between language and thought, and his ideas on thinking as a dialogue with the self have been influential in several fields. He is a part-time Professor in Psychology at Durham University, where he directs Hearing the Voice, a project on inner voices funded by the Wellcome Trust.

Reviews for Pieces of Light

[detailmuse · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I set out to write about some science, and I ended up by telling a lot of stories. In memory, more than in any other aspect of human experience, narrative seems to be the appropriate medium.Narrative does seem relevant, since the new plasticity theory of memory resembles storytelling -- that memory isn't a finished "DVD" we simply re-watch, but rather is a collection of data elements that we imaginatively reconstruct, in real time, during each recollection. And Fernyhough's narrative is interesting, with the exception of too-long recaps of experiments with his own personal memories (which, with one exception, are so inward-focused and blinder-ed that I couldn’t play along with my own memories). He also profiles the experiences of a handful of people with memory disorders and analyzes characters' experiences from literature -- most notably Proust’s use of a madeleine to illustrate how strongly our senses evoke memory.But I came to this book expecting a lot more of the "science" of the subtitle. Fernyhough touches on a number of promising topics: children's first memories and adult memories of childhood; conflicting sibling memories; "flashbulb memories" (the where-were-you-when-[x]-happened memories of high-emotion historical events); the correlation between older age (where there are fewer new experiences/new memories) and the faster passage of time; false memory; amnesia; and dementia. But they're only touches. I encountered just one particularly new takeaway: an exploration into why memories feel *familiar* (i.e. feel like they indeed happened to us rather than were just witnessed by us, e.g. in a dream) ... which led to a theory that deja vu may be a miscue where this familiarity is evoked during encoding the initial experience vs. later, during the remembered experience ... and led to a theory that PTSD may be another miscue that makes an experience feel like it's happening again vs. being recalled.Overall, this is recommended for readers interested in a mostly psychological and personal, not biological, exploration of memory. Actually, Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending is a much more interesting narrative of memory.(Review based on an advance reading copy provided by the publisher.)