Imagine the astonishment felt by neuroscientist Rodrigo Quian Quiroga when he found a fantastically precise interpretation of his research findings in a story written by the great Argentinian fabulist Jorge Luis Borges fifty years earlier. In this BIT, Quian Quiroga explores real-life cases that recall Borges's fictional “Funes the Memorious,” investigating a man who couldn't forget, and another who could not form new memories.
Parallax can be defined as the apparent displacement of an object, caused by a change in observational position. Slavoj Žižek is interested in the “parallax gap” separating two points between which no synthesis or mediation is possible, linked by an “impossible short circuit” of levels that can never meet. In this BIT, Žižek draws on Lacan, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Kant, Hegel, and Marx to explore the philosophical implications of parallax.
A welcome re-issue of an English translation of Alexander Luria's famous case-history of hypermnestic man. The study remains the classic paradigm of what Luria called 'romantic science,' a genre characterized by individual portraiture based on an assessment of operative psychological processes. The opening section analyses in some detail the subject's extraordinary capacity for recall and demonstrates the association between the persistence of iconic memory and a highly developed synaesthesia. The remainder of the book deals with the subject's construction of the world, his mental strengths and weaknesses, his control of behaviour and his personality. The result is a contribution to literature as well as to science. (Psychological Medicine ).
AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER AN NPR CONCIERGE BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR “In her form-shattering and myth-crushing book….Coe examines myths with mirth, and writes history with humor… [You Never Forget Your First] is an accessible look at a president who always finishes in the first ranks of our leaders.” —Boston Globe Alexis Coe takes a closer look at our first--and finds he is not quite the man we remember Young George Washington was raised by a struggling single mother, demanded military promotions, caused an international incident, and never backed down--even when his dysentery got so bad he had to ride with a cushion on his saddle. But after he married Martha, everything changed. Washington became the kind of man who named his dog Sweetlips and hated to leave home. He took up arms against the British only when there was no other way, though he lost more battles than he won. After an unlikely victory in the Revolutionary War cast him as the nation's hero, he was desperate to retire, but the founders pressured him into the presidency--twice. When he retired years later, no one talked him out of it. He left the highest office heartbroken over the partisan nightmare his backstabbing cabinet had created. Back on his plantation, the man who fought for liberty must confront his greatest hypocrisy--what to do with the men, women, and children he owns--before he succumbs to death. With irresistible style and warm humor, You Never Forget Your First combines rigorous research and lively storytelling that will have readers--including those who thought presidential biographies were just for dads--inhaling every page.
The hazards of perfect memory in the digital age Delete looks at the surprising phenomenon of perfect remembering in the digital age, and reveals why we must reintroduce our capacity to forget. Digital technology empowers us as never before, yet it has unforeseen consequences as well. Potentially humiliating content on Facebook is enshrined in cyberspace for future employers to see. Google remembers everything we've searched for and when. The digital realm remembers what is sometimes better forgotten, and this has profound implications for us all. In Delete, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger traces the important role that forgetting has played throughout human history, from the ability to make sound decisions unencumbered by the past to the possibility of second chances. The written word made it possible for humans to remember across generations and time, yet now digital technology and global networks are overriding our natural ability to forget—the past is ever present, ready to be called up at the click of a mouse. Mayer-Schönberger examines the technology that's facilitating the end of forgetting—digitization, cheap storage and easy retrieval, global access, and increasingly powerful software—and describes the dangers of everlasting digital memory, whether it's outdated information taken out of context or compromising photos the Web won't let us forget. He explains why information privacy rights and other fixes can't help us, and proposes an ingeniously simple solution—expiration dates on information—that may. Delete is an eye-opening book that will help us remember how to forget in the digital age.
This BIT chronicles the history of the predigital “scholar's machine”: a box of paper slips that acted both as memory aid and text generator. In it, Markus Krajewski describes the scholar's box as a form of data protection, tracing its genealogy beginning with peculiar excerption techniques of early nineteenth century scholars.
We Have Always Lived in the Castle is a deliciously unsettling novel about a perverse, isolated, and possibly murderous family and the struggle that ensues when a cousin arrives at their estate.
In Digital Freedom, N. D. Batra explores the tension between the boundlessness of the Internet and the boundaries of the marketplace, as well as the resulting impact on human expression, privacy, and social controls. Batra's thought-provoking book looks at these issues--including surveillance, intellectual property, and copyright--from the perspective of an evolutionary, self-organizing social system. This system both creates and assimilates innovations and, in the process, undergoes reorganization and renewal. Above all, Digital Freedom is an exploration of and meditation on the question: How much freedom does a person need?
For the first time, The Collected Works of C. G. Jung is now available in a complete digital edition that is full-text searchable. The Complete Digital Edition includes Vols. 1–18 and Vol. 19, the General Bibliography of C. G. Jung's Writings. (Vol. 20, the General Index to the Collected Works, is not included.) Volumes 1–18 of The Collected Works are available for individual purchase and are also full-text searchable at http://press.princeton.edu/catalogs/series/bscwj.html [The Collected Works of C.G. Jung]. The Collected Works of C. G. Jung forms one of the basic texts of twentieth-century thought: at once foundational for depth psychology and pivotal for intellectual, cultural, and religious history. The writings presented here, spanning five decades, embody Jung's attempt to establish an interdisciplinary science of analytical psychology, and apply its insights to the fields of psychiatry, criminology, psychotherapy, psychoanalysis, personality psychology, anthropology, physics, biology, education, the arts and literature, the history of the mind and its symbols, comparative religion, alchemy, and contemporary culture and politics, among others: each in turn has been decisively marked by his thought. Of timely and ongoing relevance to the understanding of these fields, Jung's writings are at the same time essential reading for any understanding of the making of the modern mind.
