The Invention of Memory: A New View of the Brain

Rating:
Summary: a wonderful little book
Review: Rosenfield's book stands out among mountains of books published on the trendy topic of mind and memory. Here he offers a most cogent argument, in the tradition of Hughlings-Jackson and Freud, against localizationist views, popular in the last century, now revived under the disguise of connectionist/computational models. As a historian of ideas, Rosenfield reports with vigor and clarity and classical precision; as a philosopher of mind (for that is what he is) he reasons with astonishing penetration and subtlety. Though this book might not get the attention it deserves today, as it is in many ways against the mainstream, mechanical conceptions of the mind, I have no doubt that it will eventually contribute to a emerging psychology of consciousness that does not flee from reality in search of simplistic ways of explanation.