Resumo de The Making Of Memory

Steven Rose''s The Making of Memory is a popular
account of recent work in the neuroscience of memory. It also deals with the
general ethical, social and epistemological issues involved in doing science;
one of his aims is to correct some of the common misconceptions about what
science is and what scientists do. Rose begins with a description of an
ordinary day in the life of his laboratory. Here he tackles head-on the thorny
issues raised by experimentation on animals (his research involves killing baby
chicks). He then presents an account of his own academic and intellectual
history, tied in with the disciplinary histories of biochemistry,
neurochemistry, and neurobiology.

One chapter is devoted to the history of ideas of memory, from the oral
traditions that preserved epics through to modern computers. Here Rose loses
his footing, and his portrait of artificial intelligence research is a
distorted strawman. He rightly complains about attempts to replace neurobiology
with computer science, but doesn''t realise that doing the opposite is just as
silly; computer memory may be different to biological memory, but it is just as
"real". It is particularly annoying that both Searle''s debunked Chinese
Room thought experiment and Penrose''s dubious indeterminacy/uncomputability of
consciousness thesis are presented without any criticism at all, and Rose''s
classification of the symbolists as holists and the connectionists as
reductionists is just confused.

The next chapter is an introduction to the phenomenology of memory, which
looks at different kinds of memory, people with unusual mnemonic abilities
(such as eidetic memories), and diseases and brain injuries which affect
memory. We also get a brief introduction to the anatomy of the brain and the
scanning techniques used to investigate it. Rose then moves on to consider
memory in animals, and in particular the experimental tests used to verify the
occurrence of associative and conditioned learning and phenomena such as
sensitization and habituation. This is tied in with the history of psychology.
A whole chapter is devoted to describing the dead end of attempts to find
"molecules of memory" and to reduce neuroscience to molecular
biology. (Rose is vehemently anti-reductionist, as is apparent throughout the
book.)

After all this background is covered, he gets down to describing the latest
work in neuroscience. One chapter describes recent work on sea-slugs and the
hippocampus, then he finally returns to his chicks, with two chapters
describing his recent research in some depth. This contains enough technical
detail to be of interest to biologists, but is still presented clearly enough
for the ordinary reader to follow. The penultimate chapter returns to the
sociology of science, with a good description of what actually happens at
scientific conferences and of how scientific papers are "fictions".
The final chapter attempts to synthesize everything.

The description above is much neater than the reality. The Making of
Memory actually deals with topics and issues as they arise, and as a
result is a rather hodge-podge kind of work. Everything that is included is
there to help the reader understand what is going on, however, and the result
is an extremely readable and very accessible book, whatever its formal
failings. In particular it does an outstanding job of portraying what is
actually involved in doing scientific research; this is a book that only a
sociologically informed practicing scientist could have written.

Readers should be warned that Rose is a Marxist and that politics do
feature, but they should not let this put them off. The most important thing is
that the science itself is interesting and well presented, and I have only one
reservation about recommending The Making of Memory - everything Rose
writes about artificial intelligence should be taken with a grain of salt.

Resumos Relacionados