Of Schemes and Memes Blog

Alice’s Analysis: Pieces of Light by Charles Fernyhough

Over the coming months, Nature’s Head of Press, Alice Henchley, will be reading and reviewing the books shortlisted for the 2013 Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books, at a rate of one every week.  The winner will be announced at a public event at the Royal Society on the 25th November 2013 during which shortlisted authors will discuss their books with host Dara O Briain.  Prior to the announcement,  we’re running a competition on Of Schemes and Memes to win a set of the shortlisted books – all you have to do is predict the winning book and enter our prize draw.

Pieces Book jacketMemory, and its idiosyncrasies, is something we all have in common.  With this as a basis, it’s easy for Fernyhough to draw us into Pieces of Light.  Try to remember your earliest childhood memory.  How old were you?  How well does the memory tally with those of your parents, your siblings?  It’s these kinds of scenarios that set you as an active character in the book and are at its heart, prompting us to question what memory truly is and how it functions.

In the case of early memories, it seems that few individuals remember events from when they were less than two and a half. Fernyhough explains that this is likely because we have not yet developed the ability to describe experiences in words and we need this ability to use language in order to code and store them.  He turns to many other elements of memory, including our memories of late teens and early adulthood, why smells and sounds can evoke such strong recollections and how we create imagined memories. Using endless case studies and anecdotes from his own life, with neurological asides, he explains autobiographical memory.

The descriptions of the act of remembering are incredibly evocative.  In particular, for me, the description of attempts to avoid contaminating a memory by saving up the triggers, a letter or a visit, until a moment when one can fully immerse oneself in it, is very familiar.  It comes as no surprise to learn that Fernyhough writes fiction as well as nonfiction: he is clearly a writer of considerable talent and Pieces of Light has a descriptive quality and narrative that is rarely found in popular science books.  Indeed, so lyrically is it delivered that it is difficult to view it as such a book, it’s more like a novel that science has stumbled into.

It’s hard to find fault with something so well-written, but I slightly bemoan the need to stuff a handy illustration of the various areas of the brain into the back of the book, as if trying to reduce the readers’ awareness that they are reading about science.  It would make much more sense to have it in the first chapter, where the parts of the brain are first explained.  That very minor point aside, this is a fascinating and well-structured book.  Fernyhough is an eloquent and sympathetic narrator who elegantly bridges the two cultures in a way that engages both scientist and non-scientist alike.

You can read Barbara Kiser’s Nature Books and Arts review of Pieces of Light here.

aliceAlice Henchley has been Head of Press at Nature since the start of 2013.  Prior to that she worked at the Royal Society and the Zoological Society of London, communicating everything from population policy to conservation of the world’s most extraordinary animals.

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