A Neuroscientist's Poignant Study of How We Forget Most Things in Life

Any study of memory is, in the main, a study of its frailty. In "Remember," an engrossing survey of the latest research, Lisa Genova explains that a healthy brain quickly forgets most of what passes into conscious awareness. The fragments of experience that do get encoded into long-term memory are then subject to "creative editing." To remember an event is to reimagine it; in the reimagining, we inadvertently introduce new information, often colored by our current emotional state. It is sobering to realize that three out of four prisoners who are later exonerated through DNA evidence were initially convicted on the basis of eyewitness testimony.