A Sense of Self: Memory, the Brain, and Who We Are

by Veronica O'Keane

Overview

How do our brains store—and then conjure up—past experiences to make us who we are?

A twinge of sadness, a rush of love, a knot of loss, a whiff of regret. Memories have the power to move us, often when we least expect it, a sign of the complex neural process that continues in the background of our everyday lives. This process shapes us: filtering the world around us, informing our behavior and feeding our imagination.

Psychiatrist Veronica O’Keane has spent many years observing how memory and experience are interwoven. In this rich, fascinating exploration, she asks, among other things: Why can memories feel so real? How are our sensations and perceptions connected with them? Why is place so important in memory? Are there such things as “true” and “false” memories? And, above all, what happens when the process of memory is disrupted by mental illness? O’Keane uses the broken memories of psychosis to illuminate the integrated human brain, offering a new way of thinking about our own personal experiences.

Drawing on poignant accounts that include her own experiences, as well as what we can learn from insights in literature and fairytales and the latest neuroscientific research, O’Keane reframes our understanding of the extraordinary puzzle that is the human brain and how it changes during its growth from birth to adolescence and old age. By elucidating this process, she exposes the way that the formation of memory in the brain is vital to the creation of our sense of self.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781324021834
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	05/17/2022
Pages:	288
Sales rank:	437,212
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.30(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Veronica O’Keane is professor of psychiatry and consultant psychiatrist at Trinity College Dublin, with over thirty years of experience in the field. She has published extensively in the academic literature and lives by the sea in Dublin, Ireland.

Table of Contents

Foreword vii

Part 1 How We Make Memories 1

1 Dawnings 3

2 Sensation: The Raw Ingredient of Memory 12

3 Making Sense 29

4 The Story of the Hippocampus 44

5 The Sixth Sense: The Hidden Cortex 65

6 A Sense of Place 87

7 Time and Experiencing Continuity 99

8 Stress: Remembering and 'Forgetting' 116

Part 2 How Memory Makes Us 131

9 Self-Recognition: The Start of Autobiographical Memory 133

10 The Tree of Life: Arborizations and Prunings 152

11 A Sense of Self 168

12 Sex Hormones and Songbirds 177

13 The Shifting Narratives of Life 191

14 False or True? 205

15 The Oldest Memories 217

Postscript 231

Notes 235

References 249

Index 261

Editorial Reviews

"A comprehensive tour of the current state of knowledge about how memory operates in the brain."

Elizabeth Landau

"Rich, revelatory and, in the best way, unsettling."

London Sunday Times

"[O'Keane's] unforgettable trip down memory’s many lanes leaves you with a marvelling awareness of what humans collectively share as memory makers and, at the same time, reminds us that each one of us is a singular translator of our world."

London Observer

"These passages are vivid and immediate, and all the more affecting for the measured and unemphatic manner in which they are set down. If O’Keane is as fine a doctor as she is a prose stylist, her patients are fortunate indeed."

John Banville

"Wonderful. I love the way Veronica O’Keane writes…difficult concepts made comprehensible with rich case studies. A must read for every counselor, psychotherapist, life coach and psychiatrist."

Philippa Perry

"Veronica O’Keane distills what she has learned about people in her life as a psychiatrist and neuroscientist. The reader will appreciate Dr. O’Keane’s beautiful prose and her caring attitudes, and will effortlessly pick up knowledge about how the brain determines our behavior."

Robin Murray

03/22/2021

Psychiatrist O’Keane draws on her work with patients as she seeks to understand “the nature of the matter of memory” in her thoughtful debut. Her desire to get to the bottom of how memory works, she writes, was inspired by a patient named Edith, who, in the early 2000s, experienced postpartum psychosis and believed her baby had been replaced with a substitute. When Edith recovered, she understood that the events she remembered weren’t real, but insisted that her memory of those events was. O’Keane was fascinated and began to wonder if there was a difference between a memory of an actual event and a memory of an imagined event. O’Keane’s ensuing “journey of memory from sensory experiences of the world and inner feeling states to neural memory lattices” includes dense discussions of the brain’s memory system that spark when she illustrates the glitches cooked into the memory-forming process. One woman, for example, believed her house was haunted and extended that delusion to other places; bipolar disorder warped another patient’s sense of time. O’Keane offers no shortage of intriguing insights and accounts, but readers looking for a cohesive narrative will be left wanting; this lands more as a series of snapshots. Still, it’s an immersive and informative look at how memory works, and what happens when it doesn’t. (May)

Publishers Weekly

"[A] roving, riverine inquiry into memory, experience, the brain…O'Keane does not try to dazzle us with interpretations and cures, but dazzle she does with the science, the clarity with which she can conjure something as ordinary, as bafflingly complex and beautiful, as a memory forming in the brain."

Parul Sehgal

"Veronica O’Keane distills what she has learned about people in her life as a psychiatrist and neuroscientist. The reader will appreciate Dr. O’Keane’s beautiful prose and her caring attitudes, and will effortlessly pick up knowledge about how the brain determines our behavior."

Robin Murray Robin Murray