Picture your twenty-first birthday. Did you have a party? If so, do you remember who was there? Now step back: how clear are those memories? Should we trust them to be accurate, or is there a chance that you’re remembering incorrectly? And where have the many details you can no longer recall gone? Are they hidden somewhere in your brain, or are they gone forever?

Such questions have fascinated scientists for hundreds of years, and, as Alison Winter shows in Memory: Fragments of a Modern History, the answers have changed dramatically in just the past century. Tracing the cultural and scientific history of our understanding of memory, Winter explores early metaphors that likened memory to a filing cabinet; later, she shows, that cabinet was replaced by the image of a reel of film, ever available for playback. That model, too, was eventually superseded, replaced by the current understanding of memory as the result of an extremely complicated, brain-wide web of cells and systems that together assemble our pasts. Winter introduces us to innovative scientists and sensationalistic seekers, and, drawing on evidence ranging from scientific papers to diaries to movies, explores the way that new understandings from the laboratory have seeped out into psychiatrists' offices, courtrooms, and the culture at large. Along the way, she investigates the sensational battles over the validity of repressed memories that raged through the 1980s and shows us how changes in technology—such as the emergence of recording devices and computers—have again and again altered the way we conceptualize, and even try to study, the ways we remember.

Packed with fascinating details and curious episodes from the convoluted history of memory science, Memory is a book you'll remember long after you close its cover.

Memory has recently become the focus of media attention because of the emotionally charged uses made of delayed recall of repressed memories. Integrating literatures from all corners of psychology, The Recovery of Unconscious Memories includes historical accounts, analysis of experiments, and treatment topics, providing the first comprehensive scientific account of memory and how can it can increase over time. Erdelyi includes his own important contributions to this field, ranging from his early attempts to use free-association to produce hypermnesia to his most recent research with hypnosis, subliminal stimuli, forced-recall techniques, and very long-delayed recall probes.

Sketching out the scientific foundations for a unified theory of repression that integrates the findings of the laboratory and the clinic, this comprehensive and authoritative synthesis of a century of memory research will be crucial reading for psychologists and clinicians, as well as forensic and legal professionals interested in the recovery of "inaccessible" memories.

"By debunking hypnosis, [Erdelyi] has allowed the debate on memory to move forward. . . . Erdelyi's work on hypermnesia is very important to our understanding of the mechanisms of memory and the brain."—Janet D. Feigenbaum, Times Literary Supplement

Most books about cinema, whether popular or academic, concentrate on what we might call the "inside" of the film: from star performances to narrative structures. The relatively few books about the "outside" of films speak mainly of such aspects of production and reception as the organization of the film industry and the sociology of audiences: the Hollywood studio system, for example, or fan clubs. The Remembered Film is unique in addressing a previously overlooked aspect of cinema: the isolated fragments of films, iconic images or scenes, that fleetingly cross our perceptions and thoughts in the course of everyday life.

Victor Burgin examines a kaleidoscope of film fragments drawn from a variety of media, the internet, memory and fantasy. Among these are sequences of such brevity they might almost be stills. Such "sequence-images", as Burgin calls them, are neither strictly "image" nor "image sequence" and have not been considered before by either film or photography theory. He also considers some typical individual experiences "sampled" from mainstream cinema. He reflects on such disparate occurrences as the association in memory of fragments from otherwise unrelated films, of the relation of a recollected film image to an architectural setting, or of a feeling "marked" by an image remembered from a film.

The Remembered Film provides a radical new way of thinking about film outside conventional cinema, and in relation to our everyday lives. It will appeal to a wide audience interested in film and media.