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

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

Victoria O’Keane. Norton, $27.95 (256p) ISBN 978-0-393-54192-2

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)