Memory

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the function and significance of memory. The great writer of remembrance, Marcel Proust, declared “We are able to find everything in our memory, which is like a dispensary or chemical laboratory in which chance steers our hand, sometimes to a soothing drug and sometimes to a dangerous poison”. The memory is vital to life and without it we could not be the people we are, but can it really contain the sum of all our experience? Is it a repository constantly mounting events waiting to be plucked to consciousness, or if not, then under what criteria are memories turfed out?With Martin Conway, Professor of Psychology at Durham University; Mike Kopelman, Professor of Neuropsychiatry at King’s College London and St Thomas’ Hospital; Kim Graham, Senior Scientist at the Medical Research Council’s Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit.

→ Listen on BBC Sounds website

Guests

• Martin Conway 3 episodes
  Professor of Psychology at Durham University
• Mike Kopelman No other episodes
  Professor of Neuropsychiatry at King's College London and St Thomas' Hospital
• Kim Graham No other episodes
  Senior Scientist at the Medical Research Council's Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit

Related episodes

• Memory and Culture
  
  27 May, 1999 150 Psychology
• The Brain and Consciousness
  
  19 Nov, 1998 150 Psychology
• Neuroscience in the 20th century
  
  24 Dec, 1998 610 Medicine and health
• Consciousness
  
  25 Nov, 1999 120 Epistemology
• The Brain
  
  8 May, 2008 610 Medicine and health
• Neuroscience
  
  13 Nov, 2008 610 Medicine and health
• Imagination and Consciousness
  
  29 Jun, 2000 120 Epistemology
• Proust
  
  17 Apr, 2003 840 French and related literatures
• Imagination
  
  28 Nov, 2002 150 Psychology
• Pain
  
  22 Jul, 1999 610 Medicine and health

Experimental. For more related episodes, visit the visual explorer.

---

Programme ID: p00548yy

Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00548yy

Auto-category: 150.1 (Memory)

Hello (First sentence from this episode)

Hello. The greatest writer about memory, in my opinion, Marcel Proust, said, quote, we are able to find everything in our memory, which is like a dispensary or chemical laboratory in which chance steers our hand, sometimes to a soothing drug and sometimes to a dangerous poison.