|
Is everything we know about the world stored in our brains like
data in a computer? In The Invention of Memory Israel Rosenfield shatters
this popular image of the brain. Rosenfield, whose writing on neuroscience has
kept readers of the New York Review of Books up-to-date on this fast-moving
field, here describes a theory of the brain as not the repository, but the creative
generator, of memory. Shedding fresh light on the contributions
of Paul Broca ("we speak with the left hemisphere"), John Hughlings-Jackson
(on why patients who lose the power of speech can curse), Jules Dejerine (and
the case of the man who could write but could not read what he had written), Freud
(on memory, emotions, and the unconscious), Rosenfield re-evaluates the fascinating
classic cases that form the basis of today's neurology. In clear and colourful
prose accessible to nonspecialists, his masterful synthesis of these clinical
findings with recent works, such as David Marr's computational model of vision,
Alvin Liberman's studies of how the brain processes speech, and Gerald Edelman's
Neural Darwinism, reveals a startling new picture of how we perceive, recognize,
and remember. Israel Rosenfield received his M.D.
from New York University and his Ph.D. from Princeton. He teaches at the City
University of New York and is the author of Freud: Character and Consciousness
and co-author (with Edward Ziff) of DNA for Beginners. |
