“Have I done or said anything amiss? You see, at this moment everything looks clear to me, but what happened just before? That’s what worries me. It’s like waking up from a dream; I just don’t remember.”
These were the words of Henry Molaison, a man whose life course was dramatically and irrevocably changed with the removal of a part of his brain — the hippocampal formation to be precise — in an experimental procedure aimed at relieving his severe epilepsy. It was the 1930s and the tragedy of the whole sequence was that it all started with a bicycle accident when Molaison was about six or seven. It culminated in what Shane O’Mara, Professor of Experimental Brain Research at Trinity College Dublin, describes as “the most acute and profound case of amnesia — or loss of memory — ever recorded in the scientific literature”.
This is the central allegory of O’Mara’s latest book, Talking Heads, which foregrounds memory as the cornerstone of our complex social lives. From the minute, a deceptively trivial unit of a marriage or friendship all the way up to the grand scale of nations, O’Mara reveals the centrality of memory in the formation of our shared social realities.
Prompted to imagine yourself in Molaison’s shoes, you will get a taste of just how vital your own personal memory system is to your everyday functioning. And if that’s not terrifying enough, the neuroscientist’s invitation to occupy a collapsing society populated solely by amnesiacs extends this lesson to the vast realm of the collective. The latter universe has a haunting, dystopian quality to it which — in those brief moments of what the author describes as his “counterfactual experiment” — leaves the reader feeling more like they are inside a science fiction novel than a popular neuroscience book.
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Over nine chapters, each a perfect length to be read with a 30-minute tea break, O’Mara takes the reader on a logical progression from our internal self-chatter to the conversations upon which nations are conceived. Except for a little choppiness created by the frequent section breaks, the chapters hang together in a refreshingly neat structure.
The secret to O’Mara’s neatness? The insertion of a common thread which, unmissable to even the most absent-minded reader, is referenced explicitly with statements that begin like this: “A consistent theme of this book is that ...”
I can think of a number of ways to finish this sentence, but all essentially point in the same direction. Without memory, there would be no meaningful relationships. Without memory, there would be no culture. Without memory, there would be just a bunch of gigantic and undelineated land masses without any actual nations. There are times when O’Mara — while crafting this same point with suavity and obvious enthusiasm — veers towards becoming a little repetitive.
A thread of equal importance, as anyone can glean from the book’s title, is conversation. Our memories provide material for important conversations between family members, friends, colleagues, whole communities, nations, and supranational organisations, O’Mara tells us. And it is these memories — shared through conversation — that serve as the fodder for our imagined futures. They enable what, in an almost poetic turn of phrase, O’Mara equates with a form of “mental time travel”.
Speaking of time travel and imagined futures, O’Mara points out that a surefire way for clever politicians to control the so-called “national conversation” is by “[reinterpreting our] collective memories of the past in the service of the call to the future.” Everyone knows about former US president Donald Trump’s seductive promise to “make America great again”, for instance. And that’s what makes the neuroscientist’s points so easily digestible: they are animated by concrete, culturally relevant examples, the more complex of which are reliably puffed up by an injection of humour.
You could talk, in abstract terms, about the potentially catastrophic consequences of what O’Mara calls “epistemic dependence” — our collective tendency to “rely on others to tell us what things mean, and what we should value”. Or you can do as the clever neuroscientist did and supply a vivid example of how we might all be undone by such a dependence: Trump’s earnest suggestion that we could all beat Covid-19 by injecting ourselves with disinfectants.
Allusions to well-known politicians, Covid-19, the so-called culture wars and “parochial bias”, the removal of cultural monuments and statues, immigration, and proliferation of social media all locate the book in this time and this place.
Here is a scientist, it seems, who closely follows current affairs through the broader lens of our neurophysiological and biological machinery. A man who peppers his opinions, which at times may stretch to a soft, unobtrusive social commentary, throughout his core scientific arguments. Personally, I think that this subtle commentary enlivens the book, offering the reader a glimpse of the kind of man who wrote it — something which might not have been so appetising had he crossed over into the realm of whiny partisanship.
A review of O’Mara’s book simply would not be complete without mention of what appears to be the scientist’s love of paradox. “We find ourselves with a paradox,” he informs us yet again so that the only thing more delicious than the paradox itself is the nearly palpable excitement of the author as he tries to tease it apart. Take for example the fact that “your experiencing self” — the you who is reading this sentence — and your “remembering self”, the you who will recall reading this sentence a month from now, are total strangers.
These brain teasers will be a thrill for anyone who likes to get down and dirty with the endless mysteries of being but they should also come with a warning label: likely to induce brain freeze in those who prefer not to gobble up too many of the world’s dizzying contradictions at once.
Luckily, I love a little paradox, myself. But if I can offer one final criticism: the sprawling passages devoted to describing research studies could use some direct speech and one or two thoughts from the researchers themselves. Getting to meet some brilliant minds in this way is far more rewarding to most readers, who enjoy that sense of being privy to an “insider secret”.
Criticisms aside, O’Mara’s book is delightfully well-written, accessible, surprisingly reflective (apparently, scientists can also be closeted philosophers) and humorous, in parts. I would not expect any less from a brain researcher who has christened his substack “Brain Pizza”.
