Oblivion (Vergeetboek)


The miracle of Forgetting

Following his books about the puzzling logic of memory, Douwe Draaisma turns to the miracle of forgetting. He claims that far from being a defect, forgetting is one of memory’s crucial capacities, blended through it like yeast through dough. Our earliest recollections make us starkly aware of the forgotten years that went before. We can retain information only because of our ability to erase it selectively.

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The Nostalgia Factory (De heimweefabriek)


Memory, time and ageing

You can no longer call to mind the name of a man you have known for thirty years. You walk into a room and forget what you came for. What was the name of that famous film you’ve watched so often? These are common experiences, and as we grow older we tend to worry more and more about such lapses. Is our memory letting us down? Are these the early signs of dementia, the beginning of the end?

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Disturbances of the Mind
From the cover:

Psychiatrists and neurologists honour their colleagues by naming diseases after their discoverers. Alois Alzheimer, James Parkinson, Georges Gilles de la Tourette , Hans Asperger — all were once men of flesh and blood whose names now signify a disease, a syndrome or an autistic disorder. In the process they lost their first names, and soon the memory of their lives and the circumstances of their discoveries vanished. In Disturbances of the Mind, Douwe Draaisma reconstructs the histories of thirteen “names” in the science of the mind and the brain. Who were these men, and what exactly did they discover? Who were their patients? Doctors like Parkinson, Alzheimer, Korsakov and Asperger, but also lesser known psychiatrists like Capgras and Clérambault had a talent that reminds one of Oliver Sacks: by writing the history of a disease, their patients come to life, seem to stand up from the paper and walk into the reader’s memory. Disturbances of the Mind offers a surprising and at the same time moving view of the recent history of brain research.

Publishing details:
Douwe Draaisma, Ontregelde Geesten. Ziektegeschiedenissen (2006)
ISBN: 978-90-6554-450-6
288 pp, with 46 illustrations
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Why Life Speeds Up As You Get Older
How memory shapes our past
Is it true, as the novelist Cees Noteboom once wrote, that ‘Memory is like a dog that lies down where it pleases’? Where do the long, lazy summers of our childhood go? Why is it that as we grow older time seems to condense, speed up, elude us while in old age significant events from our distant past can seem as vivid and real as what happened yesterday? Douwe Draaisma explores the nature of autobiographical memory. Applying a unique blend of scholarship, poetic sensibility and keen observation he tackles such extraordinary phenomena as déjà-vu, near-death experiences, the memory feats of idiot-savants and the effects of extreme trauma on memory recall.

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Rainbow pocket
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Metaphors of Memory
A History of Ideas About the Mind
What is memory? It is at the same time ephemeral, unreliable and essential to everything we do. Without memory we lose our sense of identity, reasoning, even our ability to perform simple physical tasks. Yet it is also elusive and difficult to define, and throughout the ages philosophers and psychologists have used metaphors as a way of understanding it. This book takes the reader on a guided tour of these metaphors of memory from ancient times to the present day. Crossing continents and disciplines, it provides a compelling history of ideas about the mind by exploring the way these metaphors have been used - metaphors often derived from the techniques and instruments developed over the years to store information, ranging from wax tablets and books to photography, computers and even the hologram.

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