The convergence of neuroscience, philosophy, art, music, and literature offers valuable new insights into the study of memory.The Memory Process offers a groundbreaking, interdisciplinary approach to the understanding of human memory, with contributions from both neuroscientists and humanists. The first book to link the neuroscientific study of memory to the investigation of memory in the humanities, it connects the latest findings in memory research with insights from philosophy, literature, theater, art, music, and film.
Chapters from the scientific perspective discuss both fundamental concepts and ongoing debates from genetic and epigenetic approaches, functional neuroimaging, connectionist modeling, dream analysis, and neurocognitive studies. The humanist analyses offer insights about memory from outside the laboratory: a taxonomy of memory gleaned from modernist authors including Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and William Faulkner; the organization of memory, seen in drama ranging from Hamlet to The Glass Menagerie; procedural memory and emotional memory in responses to visual art; music's dependence on the listener's recall; and the vivid renderings of memory and forgetting in such films as Memento and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. The chapters from the philosophical perspective serve as the bridge between science and the arts. The volume's sweeping introduction offers an integrative merging of neuroscientific and humanistic findings.
Contributors
John Bickle, Jean-Pierre Changeux, Valérie Doyère, Yadin Dudai, Atillio Favorini, John Burt Foster, David Freedberg, Walter Glannon, Robert Stickgold, David Hertz, William Hirstein, Joseph LeDoux, Paul Matthews, James L. McClelland, Suzanne Nalbantian, Isabelle Peretz, Alan Richardson, Edmund Rolls, Séverine Samson, Alcino Silva, Barbara Tillmann, Fernando Vidal
About the Author: Suzanne Nalbantian is Professor of Comparative Literature at Long Island University and the author of Memory in Literature: From Rousseau to Neuroscience, Aesthetic Autobiography, and other books. Paul M. Matthews is Vice President at GlaxoSmithKline in London, Professor of Clinical Neurosciences at Imperial College, London, and the coauthor of The Bard on the Brain: Understanding the Mind through the Art of Shakespeare. James L. McClelland is Professor of Psychology and Director of the Center for Mind, Brain, and Computation at Stanford University. He is the coauthor of Parallel Distributed Processing (1986) and Semantic Cognition (2004), both published by the MIT Press. With David E. Rumelhart, he was awarded the 2002 University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award for Psychology for his work in the field of cognitive neuroscience on a cognitive framework called parallel distributed processing and the concept of connectionism. Paul M. Matthews is Vice President at GlaxoSmithKline in London, Professor of Clinical Neurosciences at Imperial College, London, and the coauthor of The Bard on the Brain: Understanding the Mind through the Art of Shakespeare. James L. McClelland is Professor of Psychology and Director of the Center for Mind, Brain, and Computation at Stanford University. He is the coauthor of Parallel Distributed Processing (1986) and Semantic Cognition (2004), both published by the MIT Press. With David E. Rumelhart, he was awarded the 2002 University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award for Psychology for his work in the field of cognitive neuroscience on a cognitive framework called parallel distributed processing and the concept of connectionism. John Bickle is Professor and Head of the Mississippi State University Philosophy and Religion Department. William Hirstein is Professor of Philosophy at Elmhurst College, Illinois and the author of Brain Fiction: Self-Deception and the Riddle of Confabulation (MIT Press). Suzanne Nalbantian is Professor of Comparative Literature at Long Island University and the author of Memory in Literature: From Rousseau to Neuroscience, Aesthetic Autobiography, and other books.
