Memory: A Very Short Introduction by Jonathan K. Foster

While this work will likely serve as a useful introduction to most, it turns out that my formal education in psychology actually taught me something so almost none of the content was novel to me.

The book covers the basics of the history and development of how we have learned about memory, studies by Ebbinghaus and Baddeley, episodic, implicit, declarative, short term, long term, working memory and the like (but I thought it odd Aplysia wasn’t mentioned at all, with Kandel’s pioneering work on sensitization and habituation).

The key take away: try to understand memory as a process, or even more significantly, as a series of processes. Memory is not one thing, but many different activities working together, overlapping and combining with each other.

Should you read it? If you haven’t had much exposure, give it a try. If you have, you needn’t bother.