Invention Of Memory Paperback – October 5, 1989 by Israel Rosenfield (Basic Books)

Rosenfield's book stands out among mountains of books published on the trendy topic of mind and memory. Here he offers a most cogent argument, in the tradition of Hughlings-Jackson and Freud, against localizationist views, popular in the last century, now revived under the disguise of connectionist/computational models. As a historian of ideas, Rosenfield reports with vigor and clarity and classical precision; as a philosopher of mind (for that is what he is) he reasons with astonishing penetration and subtlety. Though this book might not get the attention it deserves today, as it is in many ways against the mainstream, mechanical conceptions of the mind, I have no doubt that it will eventually contribute to a emerging psychology of consciousness that does not flee from reality in search of simplistic ways of explanation.

Israel Rosenfield teaches history at the City University of New York, and is the author of several other books .
He states in the Introduction to this 1988 book, "This book is about a myth that has probably dominated thought ever since human beings began to write about themselves: namely, that we can accurately remember people, places, and things because images of them have been imprinted and permanently stored in our brains; and that, though we may not be conscious of them, these images are the basis of recognition and hence of thought and action... It is that assumption that this book questions... The brain is a biological structure. Only in terms of biological principles will we be able to understand it. It is the burden of this book ... to establish the importance of these principles."

Here are some representative quotations from the book:

"How does the brain 'know' that a particular sound is an example of a word...? There are no memory traces for comparison when the word is first encountered. Therefore there must be ways in which the brain can create classifications of stimuli independently of any specific memory trace; and the procedures used in classification would then be important for subsequent recognition as well." (Pg. 63)
"Memories are not fixed but are constantly evolving generalizations---recreations---of the past, which give us a sense of continuity, a sense of being, with a past, a present, and a future. They are not discrete units that are linked up over time but a dynamically evolving system." (Pg. 76)
"And since context must, of necessity, constantly change, there can never be a fixed, or absolute, memory. Memory without the present cannot exist." (Pg. 80)
"And yet, as the historical record shows,we not only create new environments but our ways of understanding any given scene or event, at a particular time, are very different from person to person." (Pg. 127)
"If memory is a fixed record, neurophysiologists still cannot determine precisely where and how memories are stored. The hypothesis of a fixed record may have been formulated prematurely, before sufficient attention could be paid to the means by which we recognize objects and events." (Pg. 158)
"One possible explanation is that our capacity to remember is not for specific recall of an image stored somewhere in our brain. Rather, it is an ability to organize the world around us in categories, some general, some specific." (Pg. 159)