14 searching for memory: the brain, the mind, and the past

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Neuropsychoanalysis: An Interdisciplinary Journal

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Searching for Memory: The Brain, the Mind, and the

PastC. Brooks Brenneis Ph.D.

b

b2700 Marshall Court, Madison, Wisconsin 53705, e-mail:

Published online: 09 Jan 2014.

To cite this article:C. Brooks Brenneis Ph.D. (1999) Searching for Memory: The Brain, the Mind, and the Past,Neuropsychoanalysis: An Interdisciplinary Journal for Psychoanalysis and the Neurosciences, 1:1, 125-128, DOI:

10.1080/15294145.1999.10773252

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Book Reviews

Edited

by

Alan Pollack (Boston)*

Searching for Memory: The Brain the Mind and

the Past by Daniel L Schacter. New York: Basic

Books, 1996, xiii 398 pp., 14.00, paperback.

In the past two decades, few areas of study have

pushed farther forward the limits of knowledge than

efforts to understand the relationship between brain

and mind. Abetted by technical innovations which per

mit careful delineation of brain structures and the

brain in action, new theories about neural networks

and parallel distributed processing, and the study of

accidentally brain damaged humans and precisely

brain damaged animals, scientists operating in very

different realms have pulled a disjointed field into a

united discipline-cognitive neuroscience. Cognitive

psychologists, clinicians, and neuroscientists who a

decade before would not have known each other or

each other's work now know both, and actively collab

orate. As a scientist who was there at the beginning

and part

of

the force that made it happen, it is hard to

imagine anyone more qualified than Daniel Schacter

to provide the b ig picture p 7) of what has been

learned, how it fits together, and what remains unclear

and unknown. Searching for Memory: The Brain the

Mind n the Past

does exactly that through the prism

of Schacter's special area of interest, memory.

Nine-tenths

of

Searching

for

Memory

is relatively

free of controversy. This is not to suggest that there

are no differing views about memory, but only that

those differences are scientific debates

of

little social

consequence. Because no science exists in a vacuum,

the remaining one-tenth-basically, but not exclu

sively chapter 9,

The

Memory Wars -is controver

sial. Memory not only offers a full view into the

discoveries of cognitive neuroscience, but also hap

pens to be the battleground for a bitter, take-no prison

ers dispute which has left few of us untouched and

*Submit books for review to Dr. Pollack, 1018R Chestnut Street,

Newton Upper Falls, MA, 02164, USA

125

unconcerned. What Schacter has to say about the issue

of recovered memories

of

past trauma is both eagerly

awaited, and in many respects, more complex than

anything he has to say about memory per see For these

reasons, I will review

Searching

fo r

Memory

one part

at a time.

Memory, like all human experience,

is

a biopsychoso

cial event. Memory involves intricate communications

between various substructures of the brain; it makes

past experience accessible and helps create an endur

ing sense of self; and it informs the behavior and voice

by which we attempt to influence and negotiate our

world. Where before the term

memory

or

long term

and

short term memory

might have sufficed, today it

is generally acknowledged to encompass'

a

variety

of

distinct and dissociable processes and systems p 7).

Schacter leads us through this terrain with new maps

and charts

as

we encounter memory which is working

(for phone numbers and the like), implicit (for priming

of perceptual recognition), procedural (for repeated

skills and habits), and explicit (for knowledge

of

our

selves and the world). Within the explicit domain, we

have stored semantic (impersonal information) and

autobiographical (personal) memory. Autobiographi

cal memory itself can be broken down into recollec

tions of lifetime periods (e.g., college years), general

event knowledge (college dating), and event specific

(first college date).

Memory's territory covers the extraordinary

as

well

as

the ordinary. Emotional intensity may render

some experiences so sharply as to be nearly indestruc

tible and unavoidable. Paradoxically, emotional inten

sity may also blot out experiences and produce dense

amnesias. The vast majority of these cases involve

some concurrent or past brain trauma and resolve

fairly quickly. Some kinds of brain damage produce


3/5

26

oddities, such as Neil, the young man who, incredibly,

was able to write down information he could not con

vey in speech. Or GR, a 67-year-old stroke victim with

no specific memories of his past and no specific sense

of

personal identity. In the midst

of

an operation, he

remembered that he had had a virtually identical oper

ation

25

years earlier, and within days regained

enough memory to reconstitute a self he had lost.

These experiences of the mind are correlates of

increasingly better understood brain activity. For ex

ample, explicit memory and the registration

of

novel

experiences involves the hippocampus, while elabora

tive encoding seems to occur within the left inferior

prefrontal cortex. The medial temporal region is criti

cal for the consolidation

of

explicit memory, but once

established, need no longer be involved. The amyg

dala, a structure which regulates emotion, also plays

an active role in memories with powerful emotional

charges. Frontal lobe injury compromises strategic re

trieval attempts and is implicated in false recognitions

and confabulations which mistakenly label the origin

of an ideation as memory (source monitoring errors).

And contrary to earlier notions, any given memory is

not collected in one place, but has pieces stored in

different locations.

Schactermakes it clear that memory is not unitary

but fractured and distributed in the brain, and similarly

that it is neither static nor veridical in the mind. No

where is this more evident than in the role of retrieval

cues. The subjective experience

of

memory is

a

new,

emergent entity (p. 70) which combines aspects

of

stored fragments (the engram) with features of the re

trieval environment to yield a recollection that dif-

fers from either

of

its constituents (p. 70). Under

some circumstances, for example, the passage

of time,

the resulting recollection may owe more to the re

trieval context than the originally encoded memory. It

is not hard to imagine that the story

of

a high school

athletic feat which emerges after a few drinks at a 25

year class reunion might deviate substantially from

whatever happened a quarter-century earlier. The fab

ric we call memory is a tapestry

of

encoded bits from

the past distributed here and there in the brain criss

crossed with influences from the present and revised

by unconscious beliefs and attitudes to emerge

as

a

coherent personal narrative. Moreover, every act of

recollection, whether for the purpose

of

introspection

or communication, is itself subject to memory and al

ters the memory in turn. And yet this incredibly com

plex process works, generally well enough and

without much conscious effort, and is a remarkable

but entirely ordinary human gift.

Book Reviews

This cursory flyover fails to do justice to the

scope

of

Schacter's vision

of

memory. Ranging back

and forth between close-ups of case histories or spe

cific research and draw-backs of broader perspectives,

a master's touch is evident throughout. His knowledge

of the scientific literature is encyclopedic, and yet of

fered in a highly accessible fashion. For those inter

ested in more details, deeper uncertainties, and precise

references, the extensive notes (pp. 309-349) and bib

liography (pp. 350-385) sections will more than suf

fice His carefully rendered case examples illuminate

aspects of memory and are often in their own right

compelling narratives. Source monitoring, for exam

ple, is illustrated with the frightening story of Donald

Thompson, a psychologist whose specialty is, ironi

cally, memory distortion and eye witness identifica

tion. Thompson was questioned by the police about

his participation in a rape because he was an identical

match to the victim's description of the assailant. In

credibly, Thompson's alibi explained the misidentifi

cation: The woman had been watching Thompson on

television just before the rape

This vast treatise on memory is written with a

scholar's love and excitement for his subject. Scien

tists derive personal satisfactions from their work, as

is evident in Schacter's engaging personal account

of

how he helped Barbara (pp. 176-179), a young woman

who had lostmuch of her autobiographical and seman

tic memory to encephalitis, to learn rather intricate

computer coding. Equally engaging, though in a differ

ent way,

is

Schacter's description

of

the discovery

of

implicit memory (pp. 161-171). His inclusion of fic

tional and nonfictional literary references, personal

anecdotes, and selected art works not only add depth,

but also convey something

of his abiding affection for

memory's many faces. One would only have wished

that the publisher of the soft cover edition had retained

the chromatic version

of

these illustrations because

the black and white ones are quite fuzzy and conse

quently lose much of their value. A small quibble

about a work of unsurpassed scholarship written with

great affection.

The aptly entitled chapter

The

Memory Wars: Seek

ing Truth in the Line

of

Fire brings to bear Schacter' s

very considerable expertise on the problem of recov

ered memories

of

trauma. This dispute ties the risk of

ignoring a genuine social evil child

abuse to

the

creation of inverted evil the falsely accused,


4/5

Book Reviews

shunned, and, in some instances, imprisoned. It

is

not

beyond possibility that one side has the more convinc

ing evidence. There are four interlocking questions to

be tackled here Can childhood abuse be forgotten?

Can these forgotten experiences be recovered with

some accuracy? Can illusory memories

of

childhood

abuse be created? And can accurate and illusorymem

ories be distinguished?

The short answer to these questions is, respec

tively, sometimes, sometimes, yes, and

maybe. To provide more detailed answers,

Schacter critically reviews the available clinical evi

dence and matches it with what is known about how

memory actually works. He acknowledges that some

people have forgotten single episodes

of

abuse, but

thinks that no credible evidence substantiates the im

mediate and long-term forgetting

of

multiple, horrific

abuse which occurs after early childhood.

As

far

as

the

recovery of memories of abuse

is

concerned, Schacter

describes several well-publicized and documented

cases, but seems to regard these

as

much more the

exception than the rule. When it comes to illusory

memories of childhood abuse, the evidence to argue

for their creation, while circumstantial, is massive.

Nonetheless, even though Schacter can find little sup

port for some of the most bizarre and incredible recov

ered memories, he notes that the absence of credible

evidence cannot be taken as conclusive. Finally, he

examines the use of implicit or unconscious memory

to distinguish real from false recollections. This tactic

seems plausible to Schacter, but clearly he views

it as

a very risky proposition. Reactions based on spe

cific prior experiences do not come with a readily visi

ble tag labeling them as implicit memory.

Consequently, inferences about what represents im

plicit memory, and not just the twitches and habits

of

ordinary life, are highly subjective and unreliable.

Schacter s deep skepticism about the veracity of

recovered memories is, to this reader, sometimes

masked by his determination to leave the scientific

door open on the phenomenon. Too often, his most

devastating arguments are bracketed with disclaimers,

given in small print in the notes section, or counterbal

anced by supporting arguments which give the benefit

of

the doubt to weak clinical evidence. On the one

hand, this introduces a measure of confusion in the

reader s mind about how strong his reservations really

are; and, on the other hand, leaves his skeptical opin

ions open to rather gross misrepresentation, as hap

pened in a olumbia Journalism Review article

(Schacter, personal communication, October 6 1998).

27

Beyond this, Schacter s critique does not make full

use of a further avenue for doubt.

The emphasis in Searching

r

Memory on the

internal processes by which the brain and the mind

encode, store, and retrieve memory slights memory s

social role. Schacter notes that there has been sur

prisingly little work concerned specifically with social

influence on memory (p. 271), but this assessment,

I think, is too narrow a view. Quite aside from the fact

that one could reasonably view most therapeutically

recovered memories as a chilling demonstration

of

so

cial influence on memory, there is much to be said

about the ways social and interpersonal forces shape

and even create memory.

Autobiographical memory is constructed as nar

rative, and because the narrative form presumes an

audience, autobiographical memories are always so

cial. They cannot exist outside

of

social consequences

and indeed yield to and are shaped by external affilia

tions, rewards, and punishments. Similarly, if apparent

priming and perceptual sensitivities are construed as

implicit memory for unremembered trauma, they too

can be used to construct a narrative, become social

events, and can be shaped by social consequences.

A case in point is providedby theGulfWar veter

ans who later developed posttraumatic stress disorder

(PTSD). A significant number of these veterans over

time changed their memories of what happened from

the less to the more traumatic (Southwick, Morgan,

Nicolaou, and Charney, 1997). What might account

for the later recall

of

traumatic events which were not

remembered just after their alleged occurrence? PTSD

may be a psychiatric diagnosis, but is also a diagnosis

with distinct social advantages, so many that it has

been described by the editor of the

merican Journal

Psychiatry

as one of the very few psychiatric diag

noses people want to have (Andreason, 1995). So

many that the diagnostic criteria had to be tightened

significantly to prevent its almost indiscriminate use.

For these Gulf War veterans, their autobiographical

memories may have been unwittingly molded and cre

ated to capture the social advantages of a diagnosis

ofPTSD

In a parallel fashion, the prerequisite construction

of illusory memories of trauma may, for some people,

be outweighed by the less clear-cut but no less power

ful interpersonal reinforcements to be derived from a

defined explanation for their distress, an agreed-upon

abrogation of certain responsibilities, and the sympa

thetic emotional support and affiliation with a trusted

authority figure. Memory is never beyond the reach of

social traffic; and while it is quite wrong to suggest


5/5

128

that Schacter is unaware of this, it gets scanted in

the main part of

Searching

r

Memory

and is not

adequately brought to bear in TheMemory Wars.

The case for therapeutically recovered memories

pales compared to the case against them. His cautions

notwithstanding, Schacter's arguments of doubt are

more than convincing to me, and can be made even

stronger by including the role of social forces in influ

encing memory. His efforts to identify shades of

gray (p. 277) seemmore rhetorical than real, and the

middle ground (p. 277) he hopes to mark out, more

virtual than real.

Searching

r

Memory

is a magnificent book. Schacter

draws from a richly textured and vast pallet of often

conflicting information to paint a wonderfully detailed

panorama

of

memory, the mind, and the brain

as

seen

in the advances of the last several decades. His love

for his subject, as well as his extraordinary erudition,

are unmistakable. Judged from the standard

of

how

many references I checked off to locate and read, it

is a treasure trove. I only wish he had stated his perva

sive doubts about the recovered memory issue less

ambiguously, and hope I have not overestimated his

skepticism in the process.

References

Andreason,

N

(1995), Posttraumatic stress disorder: Psy

chology, biology, and the Manichaean warfare between

false dichotomies.

Amer.

Psychiatry

152:963 965

Southwick, S., Morgan, A., Nicolaou, A., & Charney,

D

(1997), Consistency

of

memory for combat-related trau

matic events in veterans of Operation Desert Storm.

Amer. Psychiatry

154:173 177

Brooks Brenneis Ph.D.

2700 Marshall Court

Madison Wisconsin 53705

e mail: [email protected].

The Neuropsychology Dreams: A Clinico Ana-

tomical Study by arkSolms. Hillsdale,

NJ:

Law

rence Erlbaum, 1997, 292 pp., 55.95

This book is a goldmine, full of many deep veins al

though it also has a few shallow ones. The author

provides an extremely rich view and review of the

Book Reviews

role of the cerebral cortex in dreams. He does this in

three parts: (1) a comprehensive review

of

neurologic

literature from the nineteenth century to the present;

(2) his own study of 361

cases with cerebral lesions

and a group of symptomatic controls without CNS

pathology; and (3) a series of hypotheses he develops

which weave through the clinical material and help

keep a focus on the meaning of the findings. The major

impact

of

this book is how clearly the author demon

strates the crucial role played by a number

of

telence

phalic structures in the generation of dreams. This

convincingly contradicts the long accepted notion that

REM sleep and therefore dreaming is mainly the result

of

pontine activity. The pontine theory has contributed

to the belief that dreams are inherently meaningless.

For psychoanalysts such an idea should not make

sense. Indeed, this reviewer's sense, as an analyst, that

dreams could not be purely based on pontine activity

led to a study (Greenberg, 1966) showing the im

portant role of the visual association cortex in the pari

etal area in the generation of the eye movements in

REM sleep. At the same time animal studies also

showed the cortical contributions (Jeannerod, Mouret,

and Jouvet, 1965). Nonetheless, the belief in the cen

tral role of the pons persisted. Solms' book should put

an end to such thoughts as he shows, both in his review

of

the literature and from his own cases, the essential

role

of

the cerebral cortex in the generation

of

and

quality of dreams.

Solms begins his presentation by describing the

Charcot-Wilbrand syndrome based on case reports by

Charcot and Wilbrand. These turn out to be two differ

ent disorders although they have been lumped together

as one. In the Charcot form the patient loses visual

dreaming although dreams continue in other modal

ities. Such patients also suffer from visual irreminis

cence, a condition in which they lose all visual

imagery in waking life. The Wilbrand variant seems

to have complete cessation of dreaming. Interestingly,

the lesions in these two forms of disorder are in differ

ent locations and have differing waking symptoms.

Charcot's variant and subsequent cases like it seem to

have bilateral lesions in the medial occipital temporal

areas, while Wilbrand's variety is most clearly the re

sult of

bilateral lesions in the medial basal frontal ar

eas. As Solms provides his extremely comprehensive

review one learns that lesions in a number of other

cortical and subcortical areas can affect the subjective

experience of dreaming. He describes increases in in

tensity, decreases in intensity, and loss of some sen

sory modalities in dreams. He clearly demonstrates

how the effects on dreams are not the result of primary

14 searching for memory: the brain, the mind, and the past

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