The book, Marking the Mind: A History of Memory, provides a very interesting, readable, and concise account of how our conceptions of memory have developed over the ages. It’s author, Kurt Danziger, is a Professor Emeritus at York University in Toronto, who is renowned for his historical writings on the development of psychological categories. In this book, he focuses on the category of memory and its emergence from the writings of the Greeks through more modern-day conceptions. To extrapolate from the leaflet description, the book does an excellent job in confronting neuropsychology’s “extremely short present” with its “long past.”

Most date the emergence of psychology as a formal science back to the mid-19th century with the opening of Wilhelm Wundt’s laboratory in Leipzig. While many psychology historians have spent significant time and effort in demonstrating how origins of the field can be linked back to writings of scholars and philosophers from ancient, medieval, and modern times (Watson, Reference Watson1963), this point is likely lost on neuropsychologists, who generally consider their specialty to have developed more recently.

What is known is that psychologists began to administer standardized test instruments to patients with brain disorders in Europe and North America prior to the turn of the 20th century (Barr, Reference Barr, Morgan and Ricker2008). Halstead’s laboratory, established in the 1930s, was the first laboratory established in the United States for the study of brain–behavior relationships. Many consider that Lashley, around the same time, was the first to have used the term “neuropsychology” in his writings. While much experimental (and some clinical) work was proceeding in the 1940s and 1950s, the field of clinical neuropsychology established its roots as a profession in the 1960s and 1970s with the development of professional societies. It has flourished in recent decades in light of advances in our knowledge of brain functioning. Within the setting of modern-day neuroscience it is often difficult to remember that many of our concepts regarding behavior have origins from long ago. As this volume demonstrates, memory is no exception.

In this book, Danziger places memory within a sociohistorical context, demonstrating how the metaphors used to describe this process have, over the ages, paralleled developments in communication technology. In the early chapters, he contrasts the memory demands for ancient storytellers communicating through the oral tradition from those required by medieval monks focusing on the written word. He explains in great detail how the evolution of literacy through the ages has served to remove the source of factual memory from the individual to the external world of recorded facts. He demonstrates that concepts of “episodic” and “semantic” memory existed well in advance of Endel Tulving’s seminal contributions on this distinction (Tulving, Reference Tulving, Tulving and Donaldson1972). Similar information can be found regarding most of our knowledge about other distinct forms of memory processing.

Other parts of the book focus on philosophical approaches to subjective experience, providing an interesting account of how this type of memory eventually evolved into a biological construct, taking it from its original social context and placing it, literally, within the individual brain. The author discusses how the medical world became interested in diseases of memory in the late 19th century through accounts of amnesia and paramnestic phenomena such as déjà vu. He also specifies how memory itself became a source of pathology, as viewed within the concept of psychological trauma. He balances his outline of the origin of psychoanalysis and its emphasis on repressed memory by including the possibility that some “susceptible” individuals might undergo life-changing influences by memories that are not so traumatic. He does not shy away from exploring the distinction between “historical” and “narrative” truth with their accompanying social and political implications.

While reading this book, one readily discovers how the development of psychology as an empirical science has resulted in separating the study of memory from any relationship to context or meaning. This point can be seen most clearly in Ebbinghaus’s (Reference Ebbinghaus1913) development of the nonsense symbol and extension of this work into experiments performed by learning theorists during the majority of the 20th century. As neuropsychologists, we must be aware that this trend continues into current practice with our continued use of list-learning tests and the emphasis on measurement of rote memory in our clinical evaluations. It is hopefully a good sign that among the recent trends of our field are attempts to explore the ecological validity of our assessment procedures and to investigate new forms of memory with greater emotional and social implications. One of the challenges facing us currently is to put the meaning back into our scientific approaches to memory and the brain.

As one can see, this book has many implications for contemporary neuropsychological practice, although it does not always address these issues in a direct manner. This offers the advantage that the reader is often led to think creatively about the implications of what they are reading in this book. Its contents make it clear that most of what we now offer to our patients in the way of improving memory through current modes of rehabilitation does not differ appreciably from what had been introduced to us by the Greeks centuries ago. It raises issues of whether our modern focus on memory impairment as a pathological condition existing within the individual is, in fact, effective and whether our patients are really gaining anything from the increasing assortment of “memory clinics” and “memory drugs” offered to them, rather than focusing on modes of treatment aimed more at caretakers and the larger family or societal unit.

Marking the Mind is composed of nine well-organized chapters. Each of these is preceded by a useful chapter outline placed within a clearly readable table. Overall, the book does a nice job of reintroducing us to views of memory taken from the past while simultaneously challenging the dogma of many of our current approaches to this phenomenon. I recommend this book for those neuropsychologists who wish to proceed beyond the daily rigors of report writing and/or grant preparation and gain more of an understanding of the historical and theoretical origins of our work. It is nice to remember that we still have much to learn from the past.