Adventures in Memory

The doctor cuts further into the object, examining what's inside. And then, deep within the brain, buried in the temporal lobe, he finds something very interesting. Something small, curled up into itself. It looks, he thinks, a bit like a silkworm. The upper classes of the Italian Renaissance loved silk, a luxurious and exotic fabric that arrived in Venice via the Silk Road from China; by extension, they loved silkworms too. Intrigued, Arantius looks closer, making some careful cuts, and pries the little worm loose, liberating it from the rest of the brain.

This is the moment at which modern memory research was born, the precise moment that memory, as a concept, moved from the mythological world into the physical one. However, back then, on that particular day in sixteenth-century Bologna, life goes on in the markets as usual; people carry wine and truffles and pasta below the city's famous pergolas and ancient red brick towers, oblivious to the hugely important discovery in their midst.

Arantius turns over what he has dug out of the brain and places it on the table before him, considering what it might be. That's it! Rather than a silkworm, perhaps it is a tiny seahorse? Yes, indeed. With its head nodding forward and its tail curling up, it does look like a seahorse, the tiny distinctive fish living in shallow ocean waters between the tropics and England. And so he names it: hippocampus, meaning "horse sea monster" in Latin. It also shares its name with a mythological creature-half horse, half fish-said to wreak havoc in the waters around ancient Greece.

By the light of a tallow candle perched on an autopsy table, Julius Caesar Arantius couldn't tell what this little part of the brain actually did. All he could do was give it a name. Hundreds of years passed before we fully understood the significance of what this Italian doctor held in his hands, and you might guess that it has something to do with memory. After all, memory is the subject of this book.

The world beneath the sea and the

in Memory is full of fascinating characters and indelible scenes that will continue tumbling around in your mind long after you've turned its last page."
-Luke Dittrich, author of Patient H.M.: A Story of Memory, Madness, and Family Secrets

"Memory is one of the most important capacities we possess. Sometimes it is right, but often it is terribly wrong. In Adventures in Memory, we learn, through science and stories, just how good and how bad it can be. In this engaging book, the Østby sisters introduce us to some of the leading scientists and famous memory personalities. Be prepared to be educated and entertained at the same time."
-Elizabeth Loftus, PhD, false memory expert and author of Eyewitness Testimony