Adventures in Memory by Hilde Ostby & Yluva Ostby

This book situates what scientists know (and don’t know) about the human memory with our cultural practices as people. The two writers are Norwegian sisters (a neuro-psychologist and a novelist), so it’s heavily researched and well-written. They build everything off the premise that our memories are not static. All of what we remember is a mix of real and fake. Factors like sleep and stress and hunger and repetition and mental illness all play major roles in what and how we remember things, including our ability to have false memories implanted in us. In their words, “remembering is imagining what happened” (243). So why are our memories so unreliable? What’s the evolutionary purpose? One main reason is because we don’t have time to be remembering everything all the time. Our attention is a large factor in our memory process–that’s why it’s easier to remember stuff you care about. That’s also why you only remember certain aspects of an event that happened right in front of you. Like yo