Metaphors of Memory: A History of Ideas About the Mind (review)

Early in Metaphors of Memory we are reminded that two of the most productive scientific thinkers of the twentieth century, Sigmund Freud and Albert Einstein, used metaphors prolifically both to generate hypotheses and to propagate their theories. Grand science, it seems, frequently turns to metaphor when trying to illuminate the unknown, thereby providing one of the few examples of fruitful convergence between poetics, artistic vision and hard scientific progress. Indeed Freud, quoted here in correspondence with Ferenczi, defines scientific creativity as the interplay between "daringly playful fantasy and relentlessly realistic criticism" (p. 8), a combination of the imaginative subject with objective materialism that is sometimes lacking in contemporary reductive science.

Moving from a summary of some established theories about metaphor in the introduction to a heuristic analysis of Freud's famous wax-based "Mystic Writing-Pad" in chapter one, Draaisma begins to reveal the extent of our reliance on metaphor when describing the human mind; for it is apparent from the subtitle of this book that one cannot understand memory without provoking some theory of the mind as a whole. The materials employed by the Mystic Writing-Pad neatly link us back, through Edison's phonographic wax drum with its "memory of sound," to some of the earliest known analogies of memory, considered in chapter two, which also relied on the capacity of wax to take an impression. Plato and Aristotle both developed models of mental reception and retrieval based on the wax tablets then in common use; and these, in turn, led to various analogies of memory as writing.

Advancing through the centuries, and various mnemonic comparisons, Draaisma reminds us of the fact that the imaginative use of one thing to enlighten our understanding of another is often closely allied to our experience of the currently available technology-a point that has been made by others before. Using clear, measured prose and a well-paced narrative flow, Draaisma recounts that memory has been variously compared to abbeys and cathedrals, the aeolian harp, aviaries, theatres with stages and wings, storehouses and warehouses, phosphorescent substances, clockwork mechanisms, the telephone exchange, railway networks, the camera obscura and photography, the phonograph and cinematograph, and the more recently familiar computers systems and holographs. Around this historical data Draaisma constructs an elegant series of arguments concerning the wider social and philosophical imperatives driving scientists and thinkers to view the mind in certain lights. Frequently these arguments also illuminate the developmental processes of the very technologies that, in turn, inspired the metaphors. For example, in the section dealing with "the brain as a conscious phonograph" (p. 90) it is suggested that the excitement for nineteenth-century witnesses of hearing recorded sound played back by the phonograph was less its capacity for storage than the illusion it created of a self-aware machine. Hence in Edison's early demonstrations he had the machine enquire after the health of journalists from Scientific American as if it were some low-fidelity homunculus (p. 88).

Despite his obvious enthusiasm for the many metaphors he discusses, Draaisma is also keen to expose their flaws and weaknesses, as many contemporary commentators have been. The holographic metaphor, discussed at length in chapter seven, was initially greeted with some relief by psychologists who had no other physical models for understanding what had been experimentally verified about the functionality of the brain (p. 174). By the mid-twentieth century it was becoming clear that brain functionality is both localized (as Broca had established in the nineteenth century) and global (as Lashley had observed in rats with progressive cortex lesions). Yet, while the holistic nature of the holographic plate seemed to offer an ideal model of a physical process that could express such contradictory behavior (since, in the hologram, unlike the photograph, the localized image is distributed across the whole plate), it has ultimately proved of limited heuristic value. In quantifying the decline in the number of references and...