Adventures in Memory. Hilde østby
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2Diving for Seahorses in February
3The Skydiver’s Final Thoughts
5The Big Taxi Experiment and a Rather Extraordinary Game of Chess
Notes
Recipe for Good Memories (Acknowledgments)
FOREWORD
Sam Kean
IN ONE OF Plutarch’s Lives, he mentions an old philosophical conundrum now called the Ship of Theseus Paradox. After slaying the minotaur in the labyrinth, the Greek hero Theseus sails home, and the people of Athens are so overjoyed that they preserve his ship as a memorial. Being a material object, however, the ship shows some wear and tear as the years pass, and every so often the caretakers have to replace a piece of it—a board here, a plank there. Eventually, after several centuries, they’ve replaced every last original piece of wood. So is it still the same ship now that it was at the beginning?
You can ask a similar question about our own bodies. We’re three-fourths water, molecules of which cycle into and out of us in a constant flow, never sticking around long. And because our DNA and other biomolecules break down, we swap in new parts all the time to repair them. Skin cells get recycled every few weeks, blood cells every few months, liver cells every two years. Even bone experiences constant turnover. Over the course of a decade or so, every last atom in your body gets replaced. So are you still you at the end?
Most of us feel, intuitively, that we do remain the same person from decade to decade. But how can that be if our bodies aren’t the same? Why do we feel this continuity so strongly? One big reason is because of our memories. The bio-bits come and go, but the pattern of information coursing through our brains remains largely consistent. In a fundamental way, then, we are our memories.
Yet, few of us really understand how memory works. We rely on misleading analogies or folk theories, or we simply remain oblivious and take it all for granted: memories bubble up so easily inside us, so effortlessly, that we rarely pause to consider just what a miracle they are.
Well, no more. After reading Adventures in Memory, you’ll fully appreciate what a complex, beautiful, and intricate thing memory is. Indeed, in the hands of Hilde and Ylva Østby, memory is more than a simple repository of our selves. It’s a creative force—something dynamic that actively shapes our thinking. It has all the rich, layered complexity of human beings themselves.
What makes the book unique is the double-barreled perspective the Østby sisters bring. Unlike, say, electrons or black holes, memory is both an objective and a subjective phenomenon. We need to understand the neurotransmitters and electrical firing patterns involved, but memory is a lived thing too. We need both sides—in other words, the literary and the scientific—to make sense of memory. It’s therefore reassuring to know that Hilde Østby is a novelist and her sister Ylva a neuroscientist. Imagine if another sibling pair—William James the famous psychologist and Henry James the brilliant novelist—had combined forces, and you can see what a valuable perspective this combination provides.
We usually think about science as ultra-rational, but it’s an intensely human activity as well. And it’s especially important to see that human side when studying memory, since it does influence our sense of self so profoundly. In exploring how memory works, then, Adventures in Memory is really a dive into your innermost self—the most intimate aspects of your being. And when you surface from this dive, you’ll never see the world, or your own self, in quite the same way again.
SAM KEAN, author of Caesar’s Last Breath and The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons
— 1 —
THE SEA MONSTER
Or: The discovery of the hippocampus
Your memory is a monster; you forget—it doesn’t. It simply files things away. It keeps things for you, or hides things from you—and summons them to your recall with a will of its own. You think you have a memory; but it has you!
JOHN IRVING, A Prayer for Owen Meany
AT THE BOTTOM of the ocean, tail curled around seagrass, the male seahorse sways back and forth in the current. He may be tiny and mysterious, but no ocean creature compares to him. The only male in the animal kingdom to become pregnant, he stands on guard, carrying his eggs in his pouch until they hatch and the fry swim away into the open sea.
But let’s back up: this isn’t a book about seahorses. To find our real subject, we must rise out of the depths and journey back 450 years.
The year is 1564. We’re in Bologna, Italy, a city full of elegant brick buildings and shady, vine-covered walkways. Here, at the world’s first proper university, Dr. Julius Caesar Arantius bends over a beautiful object. Well, beautiful might be an exaggeration, if you’re not already deeply, passionately involved in its study. It’s a human brain. Rather gray and unassuming, and on loan from a nearby mortuary. Students surround the doctor, clustered on benches throughout the theater, following his work intently, as though he and the organ in front of him are the two leads in a drama. Arantius leans over the brain and slices through its outer layers, studying each fraction of an inch with extreme interest, hoping to understand what it does. His disregard for religious authority is clear in the gusto with which he approaches his dissection because, until shortly before that time, the scientific study of human corpses had been strictly forbidden.
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