The Memory Process: Neuroscientific and Humanistic Perspectives
Suzanne Nalbantian, Paul M. Matthews, and James L. McClelland
Abstract
This book offers an interdisciplinary approach to the understanding of human memory, with contributions from both neuroscientists and humanists. Linking 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 huma ... More
This book offers an interdisciplinary approach to the understanding of human memory, with contributions from both neuroscientists and humanists. Linking 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 book's introduction offers an integrative merging of neuroscientific and humanistic findings.
Keywords:
human memory,
functional neuroimaging,
connectionist modeling,
dream analysis,
neurocognitive studies,
modernist authors,
organization of memory,
visual art,
Memento,
Hamlet
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2010 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780262014571 |
| Published to MIT Press Scholarship Online: August 2013 |
DOI:10.7551/mitpress/9780262014571.001.0001 |
