Why Life Speeds Up as You Get Older

by Douwe Draaisma

Book Overview

Entertaining and educational, Douwe Draaisma's Why Life Speeds Up As You Get Older raises almost as many questions as it answers. Draaisma applies a blend of scholarship, poetic sensibility and keen observation in exploring the nature of autobiographical memory, covering subjects such as d j -vu, near death experiences and the effect of severe trauma on memory recall, as well as human perceptions of time at different stages in life. A highly accessible...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 110764626X
• ISBN13: 9781107646261
• Release Date: April 2010
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Length: 288 Pages
• Weight: 1.10 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.4" x 8.4"

Customer Reviews

A beautiful discovery

This is a nice book where the reader will get an explanation to common situations as déjà vu or near to death experiences, as well as a description of the amazing capabilities of apparently disabled people like savants.

Useful and interesting.

I would recommend this book for students, mental health professionals, and the general public. Not only does the author use understandable terms to describe technical situations, he uses clear, precise examples to help his readers understand this intricate subject. It is an easy read with gentle pacing and a very human touch. The author is European but presents universal ideas.

Lots of really interesting stuff about memory

Draaisma, a professor of psychology in the Netherlands, is a highly regarded scientist who has devoted his professional life to studying memories, but he is also a good and entertaining writer. So when he sets out in each of the essays in this book to highlight one of the many fascinating aspects of memory, you are garanteed to get a good read. The title of the book is just one of the very interesting and thought-provoking subjects he touches upon (and in case you wonder: no, there is no one clear answer to that question). A little surprise in the book comes when Draaisma switches gears and writes very eloquently about certain historical events during WWII - which then leads on to legal issues and the reliability of memories in court. The original Dutch-language version of this book gets 5 stars from me, hands down. The English translation loses a bit of the spontaneity and entusiasm that Draaisma conveys in the original, but if you're not planning on learning Dutch, and you do have an interest in memory, then you will enjoy this book a lot.

Writing and the arrow of time

This is a truly wonderful book, from which I have received many inputs for my own scholarly endeavours. Here I would just like to point out what is probably a slip of the keyboard, on p. 211 of the English edition. In the formula "'before' to the left of 'after'", occurring twice, in the first occurrence 'left' should presumably be 'right'. Writing from the right to left, as Israelis do, does indeed seem to suggest a different direction of the flow of time.

Evaluation of Our Real Memories

Every psychiatrist has some quick tests to check on how your memory is working: reciting digits forward and backward, recalling the presidents sequentially, remembering three objects after three minutes, and so on. Such functions of memory are important, but they are not what we think of as real, personal memory, the subjective recall of what has gone on in our lives, the family reunions, childhood joys and traumas, successive homes, and so on. These stored personal experiences form our "autobiographical memory." It has only been known as such for about twenty years, basically because the other types of memory (like digit recall) have been more easily subject to psychological testing. The autobiographical memory is the main subject of essays in _Why Life Speeds Up as You Get Older: How Memory Shapes Our Past_ (Cambridge University Press) by Douwe Draaisma (translated from the Dutch by Arnold and Erica Pomerans). There are surprisingly few hard answers in this book. In writing about the near-death experience, for instance, Draaisma says that examining the hypotheses that might explain it makes clear that "... all they amount to is a handful of conjectures, a few statistical links and suggestive analogies." Nonetheless, our autobiographical memories are such an integral part of ourselves that it is fascinating to learn how scientists have been trying to explain just how this vital part of personality operates, and how much of the memory capacity that we take for granted is still mysterious and beyond even initial probes. To start with, despite the book's title which is taken from just one of its chapters, there is not a fully accepted reason for older people to think that life is going faster for them than it did when they were younger. William James himself in 1890 explained that in youth, there were novel experiences, something new every day, but every passing year brought routine which smoothed the days, weeks, and years into a collapse of time. A period full of memories, viewed in retrospect, seems to expand and be fuller and longer. There is a chapter to examine the universal phenomenon that that none of us remember our earliest year or two, not at all. "We shall have to wait and see if our life ends with memory loss," Draaisma writes, "what is certain is that it starts with it." We did have working memories at the time; we were adding buckets of words to our vocabularies, and we had a daily capacity of remembering our relatives, our pets, our routines. A possible explanation for the veil drawn over the first years of memory is that the child has yet to develop full consciousness; if there is no "I" within, there can be no autobiographical memory. As befits an expert writing for laymen, Draaisma writes powerfully using comparisons. In discussing the "tip of the tongue" phenomenon, where you remember you know something but cannot remember the thing itself, he writes that there is something that has stayed back in the memory,