Reviews for Reducing the Storm to a Whisper: The Story of a Breakdown

The average rating for Reducing the Storm to a Whisper: The Story of a Breakdown based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2018-04-23 00:00:00 Jean Grier I was a little unsure at first but I ended up really liking this book. It did a good job of covering the research on animal and human memory, while chronicling the life of a man who received a lobotomy to cure his epilepsy and ended up with basically no memory, even more so than my brother. Trip can't create new memories, so he can't remember what he had for dinner last night. But Mr. M can't remember who he is, where he is, what day or year it is, what happened to him, who anyone around him is, and what happened in the prior few minutes. Plus, when I opened the book there were two boarding passes in it, in my father's and stepmother's names. I gave the book to my father after my brother tried to kill himself, managing only to destroy his hippocampus instead. My father gave the book back to me, commenting that it didn't really tell him anything new. Very strange comment from my dad, who never says anything bad to anyone.

Review # 2 was written on 2017-04-01 00:00:00 jonathan winter Here we find that squares of the mind are stranger than we imagine; the memory of our own traits does not depend on our collection of personal memories. They inhabit separate provinces. We do not arrive at summaries about ourselves by concluding from instances. Rather, we acquire and store a sketchy knowledge of ourselves more as we store word fragments than as we store the events of our days. Makes me feel better about my near complete lack of childhood memories. I can just substitute in some imagined events and be like everyone else. It is only now understood that memory and imagination are at base the same process, and they can contaminate one another. Because of the abstracted nature of our grasp of the world, we lose directness, but at the same time we gain another power. In the world itself, a rock may not bend, nor may it merge with rocks of other colors. But the representations of these among our neurons can bend or mix in any sort of chimera, any felicitous or fearful hybrid. Neurons react not only to direct sensations from the world but to signals from each other. What are uncooperative solids outside us may be combined and recombined as easily as colored dyes in a transparent gel, as easily as shadow and light merge.