This book is an amalgamation of an autobiography and science, where the author gives a vivid account of how his personal quest to understand memory intersected with the emergence of a new science. It explains the astonishing story of how four different and distinct disciplines? behaviourist psychology, cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and molecular biology? converge into a powerful new science of mind.

Through its profound insights into thought, perception, action, recollection, and mental illness, this new science is revolutionising our understanding and memory level while simultaneously showing great promise for more effective healing.

Most memoirs merely present the contents of memory to the readers, but this remarkable account by a pioneering neurobiologist actually opens up the cellular and biochemical structure of memory.

In a provocative conclusion, he contemplates the broad cultural meaning of memory as he chronicles his visit to a 21st century Vienna still determined to forget its complicity in Nazi atrocities. The book indeed is an autobiography of exceptional substance.