Pieces of Light: How the New Science of Memory Illuminates the Stories We Tell About Our Pasts
Readers who conceptualize memories as snapshots stored in a mental library will find Fernyhough’s thoughtful exploration of recent memory research unsettling. Autobiographical memories, he declares, are mental constructions, created in the present moment, according to the demands of the present; memory itself is best understood as like a habit, a process of constructing something from its parts, in similar but subtly changing ways each time. Fernyhough, who writes fiction as well as psychological studies, is a deft guide to discoveries that have led memory researchers to stress the centrality of storytelling. Pieces of Light can be seen as a series of the author’s stories that displays the molecular, neural, and cognitive elements of memory and its emotional, personal, social, and cultural components. In constructing memories, he suggests, the desire for correspondence (telling the truth) may conflict with the need for coherence (telling a good story), a tension likely to be resolved differently at different times. So, while Fernyhough celebrates the complexity of our memories, he counsels a bit of healthy skepticism about their veracity. --Mary Carroll