What if your memory suddenly vanished? What if you could no longer summon up any recollections of your mother's embrace, a best friend's confidences, or the moment you first met your spouse? 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 these 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. Your various memory systems, in fact, provide the continuity of consciousness that allows the concept of "you" to make sense, creating the ongoing narrative that makes your life truly yours. Without those systems and the overall experience of memory they make possible, you would have no context for the most crucial decisions of your life. You would have to make-without the benefit of experience and knowledge-the decisions that determine not only your quality of life, but your very survival. And your ability to learn, or even to form the personality that makes you unique, would similarly be set adrift. In "Memory and the Human Lifespan", Professor Steve Joordens of the University of Toronto Scarborough, who has been repeatedly honored as both teacher and researcher, leads you on a startling voyage into the human mind, explaining not only how the various aspects of your memory operate, but the impact memory has on your daily experience of life. His 24 riveting lectures carefully explain the different kinds of systems that come together to 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. Moreover, 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.

Course guidebook includes professor biography, course scope note, lecture guides and notes, glossary and bibliography.

Disc 1. Memory is a party -- The ancient "art of memory" -- Rote memorization and a science of forgetting -- Sensory memory: brief traces of the past -- The conveyor belt of working memory -- Encoding: our gateway into long-term memory / Disc 2. Episodic and semantic long-term memory -- The secret passage: implicit memory -- From procedural memory to habit -- When memory systems battle: habits vs. goals -- Sleep and the consolidation of memories -- Infant and early childhood memory / Disc 3. Animal cognition and memory --Mapping memory in the brain -- Neural network models -- Learning from brain damage and amnesias -- The many challenges of Alzheimer's disease -- That powerful glow of warm familiarity / Disc 4. Déjà vu and the illusion of memory -- Recovered memories or false memories? -- Mind the gaps! memory as reconstruction -- How we can choose what's important to remember - Aging, memory and cognitive transition -- The monster at the end of the book.