“Who are you?” Chances are you’d answer this question by describing the highlights of your personality, interests, and life experiences. But if you’d been asked this same question yesterday, you might have responded with a slightly different description. Does that mean you are a particular person today but were a different person yesterday? And what about tomorrow? Welcome to the slippery, shape-shifting nature of memory. As Professor Gabrielle Principe reveals in How Memory Works and Why Your Brain Remembers Wrong, “you” are the conglomeration of the often-unreliable information your brain decides to feed you at any given moment. Over the course of these 12 fascinating lectures, you’ll come to understand why everything you experience in this life is an illusion—nothing more and nothing less than an interpretation of signals received, assembled, and reassembled over and over, and over again, by your brain. This might sound like the plot of a sci-fi thriller or a terrifying novel. But the pliability—and even unreliability—of your memory is no accident. Six hundred million years of evolution have brought you what you have today: the best memory for Homo sapiens. Yes, you hate it when you can’t remember where you put your car keys. But through this course, you’ll come to realize that each of the obvious negatives of your memory has a flip side that supports your ability to survive and thrive.
