Memory science in the twentieth century (original) (raw)

Topics covered here include Freud’s psychoanalysis (section 2), Ebbinghaus’s repurposing of psychophysics (section 3), Bartlett’s notion of constructive remembering (section 4), post-war efforts to assimilate human memory to computer memory (section 5), and the present connectionist paradigm (section 6). One unifying theme is the striking role of metaphor and simile in scientific memory discourse. [Penultimate draft. Final version forthcoming in S. Berger and J. Olick (eds.), A Cultural History of Memory (Bloomsbury Academic).]