Memory and the Human Lifespan by The Great Courses

What if your memory suddenly vanished, so that you could no longer summon recollections of anything at all? What if you couldn’t even remember yourself – not your name, your school, where you worked, or even the face of the total stranger staring back at you from the mirror? If all of your memories were gone, would “self” even have a meaning? The truth is that while you may think of human memory as a capacity – a way to call up important facts or episodes from your past – it is much, much more, a collection of systems that provide the continuity of consciousness that allows the concept of “you” to make sense, creating the ongoing narrative that makes your life truly yours. This intriguing series of 24 lectures by an honored researcher and teacher explains not only how the various aspects of your memory operate, but the impact memory has on your daily experience of life. By understanding how the brain organizes and encodes information, you can better harness its extraordinary powers to fine-tune how it works for you and use this information to help reshape your very experience of being alive. The lectures explore topics like: the different kinds of systems that make memory possible; how those systems work together to build and access memories of specific events, solve problems, learn basic tasks like brushing your teeth, or acquire the skills to play a musical instrument; the kinds of memory deficits that result when various parts of the brain are damaged or deteriorate; how memory shapes not only your experience of the past but also of the present, as well as your expectations of the future; and how your memory systems develop throughout your life.

About the Great Courses

It all began with just a few videotapes—and a brilliant inspiration.

Tom Rollins, the founder of The Great Courses, was a law student at Harvard University and was facing an important exam on the U.S. Federal Rules of Evidence—an exam for which he wasn’t prepared.

Dreading the notoriously boring subject but knowing his success depended on understanding the material, Rollins obtained videotapes of 10 lectures by a noted authority on the subject, Professor Irving Younger. Rollins planted himself in front of his television late at night and put the first tape into his VCR. What he discovered changed his life.

The tapes were unlike anything Rollins had experienced in his Harvard lecture halls. Professor Younger’s lectures were outrageously insightful, impressively thorough, and engagingly witty. Most important: They hammered home the concepts in a way that made the subject both accessible and interesting. They made learning not a chore to be accomplished but an adventure to be experienced.

Rollins played all 10 hours of those lectures nearly nonstop. A few days later he passed his exam and went on to make an “A” in the course.

He never forgot the unique power of recorded lectures by a great teacher—the way that a bright mind could ignite a passion for lifelong learning. And years later, in 1990, Rollins founded The Great Courses to share that unforgettable experience with the rest of the world.

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