Top Favorite Books of 2009 by Reading Group Choices When she becomes increasingly disoriented and forgetful, a tragic diagnosis changes her life - and her relationship with her family and the world - forever.

At 50 years old, she’s a cognitive psychology professor at Harvard and a world-renowned expert in linguistics with a successful husband and three grown children. And that can be life-changing.Alice Howland is proud of the life she worked so hard to build. You can set educated expectations for your memory, and in doing so, create a better relationship with it. Once you understand the language of memory and how it functions, its incredible strengths and maddening weaknesses, its natural vulnerabilities and potential superpowers, you can both vastly improve your ability to remember and feel less rattled when you inevitably forget. And you’ll see how memory is profoundly impacted by meaning, emotion, sleep, stress, and context. You’ll come to appreciate the clear distinction between normal forgetting (where you parked your car) and forgetting due to Alzheimer’s (that you own a car). You’ll learn whether forgotten memories are temporarily inaccessible or erased forever and why some memories are built to exist for only a few seconds (like a passcode) while others can last a lifetime (your wedding day). In Remember, neuroscientist and acclaimed novelist Lisa Genova delves into how memories are made and how we retrieve them. Forgetting is actually part of being human.

Just because your memory sometimes fails doesn’t mean it’s broken or succumbing to disease. Our brains aren’t designed to remember every name we hear, plan we make, or day we experience. Why? Because while memory is amazing, it is far from perfect. In reality, for the vast majority of us, these examples of forgetting are completely normal. You might even be worried that these lapses in memory could be an early sign of Alzheimer’s or dementia. Have you ever felt a crushing wave of panic when you can’t for the life of you remember the name of that actor in the movie you saw last week, or you walk into a room only to forget why you went there in the first place? If you’re over forty, you’re probably not laughing. A fascinating exploration of the intricacies of how we remember, why we forget, and what we can do to protect our memories, from the Harvard-trained neuroscientist and bestselling author of Still Alice.

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