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In the past two decades, few areas of study have pushed farther forward the limits of knowledge than efforts to understand the relationship between brain and mind. Abetted by technical innovations which permit careful delineation of brain structures and the brain in action, new theories about neural networks and parallel distributed processing, and the study of accidentally brain damaged humans and precisely brain damaged animals, scientists operating in very different realms have pulled a disjointed field into a united discipline—cognitive neuroscience. Cognitive psychologists, clinicians, and neuroscientists who a decade before would not have known each other or each other's work now know both, and actively collaborate. As a scientist who was there at the beginning and part of the force that made it happen, it is hard to imagine anyone more qualified than Daniel Schacter to provide the “big picture” (p. 7) of what has been learned, how it fits together, and what remains unclear and unknown. Searching for Memory: The Brain, the Mind, and the Past does exactly that through the prism of Schacter's special area of interest, memory.
Nine-tenths of Searching for Memory is relatively free of controversy. This is not to suggest that there are no differing views about memory, but only that those differences are scientific debates of little social consequence. Because no science exists in a vacuum, the remaining one-tenth—basically, but not exclusively chapter 9, “The Memory Wars”—is controversial. Memory not only offers a full view into the discoveries of cognitive neuroscience, but also happens to be the battleground for a bitter, take-no prisoners dispute which has left few of us untouched and unconcerned. What Schacter has to say about the issue of recovered memories of past trauma is both eagerly awaited, and in many respects, more complex than anything he has to say about memory per se. For these reasons, I will review Searching for Memory one part at a time.
Memory, l