The Making of Memory
by Steven Rose
Summary
Most popular neuroscience reports the findings; Rose's book takes the reader inside the finding of them. Its spine is his own laboratory at the Open University, where for decades he pursued one question: when a day old chick learns something, what physically changes in its brain?
The experimental system is a small masterpiece of design, and Rose teaches it lovingly: chicks will peck at a bright bead, and if the bead is bitter they remember and refuse it afterwards, one trial, one memory, a window in which whatever memory is made of must be being made. The book follows the hunt through the tissue, the cascades of molecules, the strengthened synapses, the anatomical asymmetries, and simultaneously documents what the hunt actually consists of: grant applications, dead ends, the sacrifice of animals weighed honestly, the politics of conferences, the drudgery and craft of bench work, a working scientist's year rendered with the texture novels usually own, down to the coffee room arguments and the referee reports.
Around the chick Rose builds the larger subject: memory from Aristotle through the mnemonists to molecular biology, sharp scepticism about machine metaphors for the brain, and a socialist biologist's insistence, familiar from his public feuds, that reductionism explains less than it claims, that a memory is not merely its molecules but a property of a whole organism with a history.
Around three hundred and fifty pages.
Best for readers who want to know what neuroscience is actually like to do, and a book about memory honest enough to include the failures.
Historical Context & Significance
The Making of Memory won the Science Book Prize in 1993, the judges calling it a riveting read and singling out exactly its distinction, a first hand account from the forefront by a practising scientist, which almost none of the prize's winners before or since have been in quite this hands in the tissue sense.
Steven Rose was among Britain's best known public scientists and among its most combative: a founder of the radical science movement, co author with Hilary Rose of critiques of sociobiology and later of neuro hype, and a career long antagonist of Dawkins and Wilson style gene centrism, a politics that runs openly through the book's final chapters.
The chick memory programme itself produced many papers and candidate memory molecules, and the book remains assigned reading less for its specific biochemistry, which moved on, than for its portrait of science as labour: reviewers keep rediscovering it whenever laboratory life becomes a subject again.