What makes us remember? Why do we forget? And what, exactly, is a memory? In Diving for Seahorses, two sisters, a novelist and a neuroscientist answer these questions with playfulness and intelligence. The Østby's skillfully interweave history, research, and exceptional personal stories, taking readers on a captivating exploration of the evolving science of memory.

A novelist and a neuroscientist uncover the secrets of human memory.

What makes us remember? Why do we forget? And what, exactly, is a memory?

With playfulness and intelligence, Adventures in Memory answers these questions and more, offering an illuminating look at one of our most fascinating faculties. The authors-two Norwegian sisters, one a neuropsychologist and the other an acclaimed writer-skillfully interweave history, research, and exceptional personal stories, taking readers on a captivating exploration of the evolving understanding of the science of memory from the Renaissance discovery of the hippocampus-named after the seahorse it resembles-up to the present day. Mixing metaphor with meta-analysis, they embark on an incredible journey: "diving for seahorses" for a memory experiment in Oslo fjord, racing taxis through London, and "time-traveling" to the future to reveal thought-provoking insights into remembering and forgetting. Along the way they interview experts of all stripes, from the world's top neuroscientists to famous novelists, to help explain how memory works, why it sometimes fails, and what we can do to improve it.

Filled with cutting-edge research and nimble storytelling, the result is a charming-and memorable-adventure through human memory.

Vorwort
International publicity campaign Features in major science, popular science, and psychology publications International radio and podcast interviews, including BBC, NPR, and CBC Excerpts and reviews in literary journals Outreach to key science bloggers Advance reading copies

Autorentext

Hilde Østby is a writer and editor and the author of Encyclopedia of Love and Longing, a novel about unrequited love that was published to critical acclaim in Norway. She has a master’s degree in History of Ideas from the University of Oslo.

Ylva Østby is a clinical neuropsychologist with a PhD from the University of Oslo who devotes her research to the study of memory. She is also vice-president of the Norwegian Neuropsychological Society. She lives in Oslo, Norway.

Sam Kean is the New York Times bestselling author of The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons. His stories have appeared in the New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, among other publications.

Klappentext

Originally published in Norwegian in 2016 as êA dykke etter sj²hester: En bok om hukommelse (Diving for Seahorses: A Book About Memory).

Zusammenfassung

A novelist and a neuroscientist uncover the secrets of human memory.

What makes us remember? Why do we forget? And what, exactly, is a memory?

With playfulness and intelligence, Adventures in Memory answers these questions and more, offering an illuminating look at one of our most fascinating faculties. The authors—two Norwegian sisters, one a neuropsychologist and the other an acclaimed writer—skillfully interweave history, research, and exceptional personal stories, taking readers on a captivating exploration of the evolving understanding of the science of memory from the Renaissance discovery of the hippocampus—named after the seahorse it resembles—up to the present day. Mixing metaphor with meta-analysis, they embark on an incredible journey: “diving for seahorses” for a memory experiment in Oslo fjord, racing taxis through London, and “time-traveling” to the future to reveal thought-provoking insights into remembering and forgetting. Along the way they interview experts of all stripes, from the world’s top neuroscientists to famous novelists, to help explain how memory works, why it sometimes fails, and what we can do to improve it.

Filled with cutting-edge research and nimble storytelling, the result is a charming—and memorable—adventure through human memory.

Leseprobe

From chapter one: The Sea monster

Your memory is a monster; you forget—it doesn’t. It simply files things away. It keeps things for you, or hides things from you—and summons them to your recall with a will of its own. You think you have a memory; but it has you!—John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany

At the bottom of the ocean, tail curled around seagrass, the male seahorse sways back and forth in the current. He may be tiny and mysterious, but no ocean creature compares to him. The only male in the animal kingdom to become pregnant, he stands on guard, carrying his eggs in his pouch until they hatch and the fry swim away into the open sea.

But let’s back up: this isn’t a book about seahorses. To find our real subject, we must rise out of the depths and journey back 450 years.

The year is 1564. We’re in Bologna, Italy, a city full of elegant brick buildings and shady, vine-covered walkways. Here, at the world’s first proper university, Dr. Julius Caesar Arantius bends over a beautiful object. Well, beautiful might be an exaggeration, if you’re not already deeply, passionately involved in its study. It’s a human brain. Rather gray and unassuming, and on loan from a nearby mortuary. Students surround the doctor, clustered on benches throughout the theater, following his work intently, as though he and the organ in front of him are the two leads in a drama. Arantius leans over the brain and slices through its outer layers, studying each fraction of an inch with extreme interest, hoping to understand what it does. His disregard for religious authority is clear in the gusto with which he approaches his dissection because, at the time, the scientific study of human corpses is strictly forbidden.

The doctor cuts further into the object, examining what’s inside. And then, deep within the brain, buried in the temporal lobe, he finds something very interesting. Something small, curled up into itself. It looks, he thinks, a bit like a silkworm. The upper classes of the Italian Renaissance loved silk, a luxurious and exotic fabric that arrived in Venice via the Silk Road from China; by extension, they loved silkworms too. Intrigued, Arantius looks closer, making some careful cuts, and pries the little worm loose, liberating it from the rest of the brain.

This is the moment at which modern memory research was born, the precise moment that memory, as a concept, moved from the mythological world into the physical one. However, back then, on that particular day in sixteenth-century Bologna, life goes on in the markets as usual; people carry wine and truffles and pasta below the city’s famous pergolas and ancient red brick towers, oblivious to the hugely important discovery in their midst.

Arantius turns over what he has dug out of the brain and places it on the table before him, considering what it might be. That’s it! Rather than a silkworm, perhaps it is a tiny seahorse? Yes, indeed. With its head nodding forward and its tail curling up, it does look like a seahorse, the tiny distinctive fish living in shallow ocean waters between the tropics and England. And so he names it: hippocampus, meaning “horse sea monster” in Latin. It also shares its name with a mythological creature—half horse, half fish—said to wreak havoc in the waters around ancient Greece.

By the light of a tallow candle perched on an autopsy table, Julius Caesar Arantius couldn’t tell what this little part of the brain actually did. All he could do was give it a name. Hundreds of years passed before we fully understood the s…