The Rag and Bone Shop. How We Make Memories and Memories Make Us

 

We are entirely formed by memory, it gives us our sense of self, our past, our present and our future. But when it goes wrong, so does our relationship with others and with the outside world.

Veronica O’Keane, Professor of Psychiatry and practising Consultant Psychiatrist uses memorable case studies of people suffering from schizophrenia, post-partum psychosis, brain tumours, anorexia to show how we lay down experience, how memories are hardwired into our reality and make no distinction between hallucination, or dream, or reality.

She has a knack for explaining the neurology for the layman: the time lag between immediate experience and when it is filed away, why smell is hot-wired into all sensory memories, where psychosis comes from, and why you can never eradicate a memory because it is part of you. And finally, the way that literature and film and fairy tales echo, consciously or unconsciously, the issues that she deals with in psychiatry.

Professor Veronica O’Keane is a practising consultant psychiatrist and a Professor in Psychiatry at Trinity College Dublin.