Why We Remember

Starred review from December 18, 2023
Ranganath, a psychology professor at the University of California Davis, debuts with a riveting overview of how memory works. He explains that the prefrontal cortex helps coordinate brain activity and direct attention, influencing what details are remembered or forgotten, and that the hippocampus enables recall by reactivating the neuronal connections that were active at the moment a memory formed. Discussing memory’s fallibility, the author describes how in the 1990s psychologist Elizabeth Loftus presented study subjects with a list of memories, three real and one made-up, assembled by a “trusted close relative” and found that, after repeated questioning, the participants began to “remember” and embellish the fake event. A contributing factor to false memories, he suggests, is that information about “what’s happening at the time you are trying to reconstruct the experience” gets incorporated into the original memory during recall, so that “every time you recall the event, the memory updates a little bit more.” Ranganath has a knack for describing neuroanatomy in accessible terms, and the science consistently surprises, as when he reports on research showing how individuals often have worse recall when working in groups because listening to the recollections of others can crowd out one’s own memories, producing a “homogenizing” effect in which information that’s not shared is more readily forgotten. Approachable and enlightening, this is worth seeking out. Agent: Rachel Neumann, Idea Architects.