WSJ Five Best books on memory

The Wall Street Journal runs a weekly "Five Best Books on" feature, each one written by a different person.

Eric Kandel wrote the Five Best list of books on memory: ($?)


1. Ficciones
By Jorge Luis Borges
Grove, 1962

....one of the most fascinating descriptions of memory in fiction can be found in Jorge Luis Borges's seminal short-story collection, "Ficciones," first published in 1945 in Spanish. Borges, who knew for much of his life that he was slowly going blind from a hereditary disease, had a deep sense of the central and sometimes paradoxical role of memory in human existence. This sense informs much of "Ficciones" but particularly the story "Funes, the Memorious," which concerns a man who suffers a modest head injury after falling off a horse and, as a result, cannot forget anything he has ever experienced, waking or dreaming. But his brain is filled only with detail, crowding out universal principles. He can't create because his head is filled with garbage! We know that an excessively weak memory is a handicap, but, as Borges shows, having too good a memory can be a handicap as well -- the capacity to forget is a blessing.

2. Memories Are Made of This
By Rusiko Bourtchouladze
Columbia, 2002

There are several good introductions to the biology of memory storage for the general reader, but I particularly like Rusiko Bourtchouladze's. A gifted writer who is also a behaviorist, she discusses both of the great themes of memory research.....Bourtchouladze describes the now famous patient called H.M., who underwent brain surgery that left him with a devastating memory loss. H.M. could not store any new information about people, places and objects. The great Canadian psychologist Brenda Milner studied H.M. and, in a classic analysis carried out over two decades, succeeded in localizing this component of memory storage to the medial temporal lobe. Bourtchouladze brings these riveting discoveries to life.

3. Memory and Brain
By Larry R. Squire
Oxford, 1987

"Memory and Brain" is a classic in the biology of memory. In it, Larry R. Squire, a professor of psychiatry and neuroscience at the University of California at San Diego, provides a superb historical overview of the key experiments and insights that have given rise to our current understanding of the problem of memory storage. Squire himself has played a vital role in this history: He pioneered our understanding that memory exists in two major forms: declarative memory (this is the kind of memory that H.M. lost) and procedural memory (for motor and perceptual skills such as riding a bike or hitting a backhand -- this is the memory that H.M. retained).....

4. The Seven Sins Of Memory
By Daniel L. Schacter
Houghton Mifflin, 2001

In "The Seven Sins of Memory: How the Mind Forgets and Remembers," Harvard professor Daniel L. Schacter shows that declarative memory (the kind involving people, places and objects) is highly fallible and susceptible to distortion and suggestion. The seven "sins" refers to memory's various weaknesses: its transience, absentmindedness, blocking, misattribution, suggestibility, bias and persistence. Schacter .... [reveals memory's] extraordinary vulnerability to influence by authority figures....

5. Memory From A to Z
By Yadin Dudai
Oxford, 2002

Any question that remains unanswered after reading the above works by Bourtchouladze, Squire and Schacter can be answered by Yadin Dudai, a professor at the Weizmann Institute in Israel. ...The book is a handy reference, accessible to the general reader.


In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind by Eric Kandel
Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis, and the New Biology of the Mind by Eric Kandel
Principles of Neural Science by Eric Kandel
Memory: From Mind to Molecules by Kandel & Squire