Summary

In 1993, approaching his sixtieth birthday, Oliver Sacks experienced "a curious phenomenon--the spontaneous, unsolicited rising of early memories into [his] mind, memories that had lain dormant for upward of fifty years" (101). He describes two memories in particular, both from his boyhood in London during World War II. On one occasion, he remembers evacuating during the London Blitz and on another, he remembers an incendiary bomb falling behind their family home. After corroborating his memories with his elder brother, Sacks was shocked to learn that he wasn't present during the second incident and that he had constructed a very real memory based on stories of the incident as told to him by others who were there. His first memory of the evacuation however, jived with his brother's recounting of the same event. This prompts Sacks to question the nature of memory, including the...