In “Remember,” her first nonfiction work, Genova assures her readers that only two per cent of Alzheimer’s cases are of the strictly inherited, early-onset kind. Her novel “ Still Alice,” from 2007, centered on a Harvard psychology professor who is diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s.

Genova, a neuroscientist by training, has spent most of her working life writing fiction about characters with various neurological maladies. “You can be 100 percent confident in your vivid memory,” Genova writes, “and still be 100 percent wrong.” It is sobering to realize that three out of four prisoners who are later exonerated through DNA evidence were initially convicted on the basis of eyewitness testimony. A dream, a suggestion, and even the mere passage of time can warp a memory.

The fragments of experience that do get encoded into long-term memory are then subject to “creative editing.” To remember an event is to reimagine it in the reimagining, we inadvertently introduce new information, often colored by our current emotional state. In “ Remember,” an engrossing survey of the latest research, Lisa Genova explains that a healthy brain quickly forgets most of what passes into conscious awareness. A Neuroscientist’s Poignant Study of How We Forget Most Things in Life (The New Yorker):Īny study of memory is, in the main, a study of its frailty.

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