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 deja-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 and personal read, this book will not fail to touch or provoke thought in its readers.

Sergei Korsakoff, Alois Alzheimer, James Parkinson, Hans Asperger and other eminent scientists, are all names which have become synonymous with a disease, a syndrome, or an autistic disorder. Although the names of these psychiatrists and neurologists are familiar, we often know little about the individuals themselves and the circumstances surrounding their discoveries. What exactly did they discover, and who were their patients? Douwe Draaisma expertly reconstructs the lives of these and eight other 'names' from the science of mind and brain. Disturbances of the Mind provides a fascinating, illuminating, and at times touching insight into the history of brain research. Thanks to Draaisma's unerring eye and elegant, engaging style, the case histories of Asperger, Bonnet, Capgras, Clerambault, Korsakoff and Gilles de la Tourette syndromes; Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases; the areas of Broca and Brodmann; Jackson's epilepsy; and the Gage matrix are all brought to life and transformed into unforgettable tales.

Is it true, as the novelist Cees Nooteboom once wrote, that memory is like a dog that lies down where it pleases? Where do the long, lazy summers of our childhood go? Why, as we grow older, does time seem to condense, speed up and elude us, while in old age, significant events from our distant past can seem as vivid and real as what happened yesterday? Douwe Draaisma, author of the internationally acclaimed Metaphors of Memory (Cambridge, 2001), explores the nature of autobiographical memory. Applying a unique blend of scholarship, poetic sensibility, and keen observation, he tackles such extraordinary phenomena as deja-vu, near-death experiences, the memory feats of idiot savants, and the effects of extreme trauma on memory recall. Raising almost as many questions as it answers, this fascinating book will not fail to affect you at the same time as it educates and entertains. Douwe Draaisma is Professor of the History of Psychology in the Department of Theory and History of Psychology at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands. He has published books on time and memory and his articles have appeared in professional journals as diverse as Annals of Science, Psychological Medicine, and Nature. The original Dutch version of Why Life Speeds Up As You Get Older has won several scientific and literary awards.

What is memory? Without memory we lose our sense of identity, reasoning, even our ability to perform simple physical tasks. Yet it is elusive and difficult to define, and throughout the ages philosophers and psychologists have used metaphors as a way of understanding it. This fascinating book takes the reader on a guided tour of these metaphors of memory from ancient times to the present day, exploring the way metaphors often derived from the techniques and instruments developed to store information such as wax tablets, books, photography, computers and even the hologram.