Introduction

Everyone is fascinated by memory and nearly everyone feels that they would prefer their memory to be a little better. Memorising lines in a play, or memorising multiplication tables, is the kind of hard work that people like to avoid. The slow growth of experience that counts as wisdom seems to be the gradual accumulation of memories over a lifetime. If only we could pass on our memories directly we could use our creative abilities from an early age without needing to spend years building the foundations first.

Between the late 1950s and the mid-1970s it began to look as though one day we might be able to build our memories without the usual effort. This was as a result of experiments done by James V. McConnell and, later, Georges Ungar, on the chemical transfer of memory in worms and rats. If memories are encoded in molecules then, in principle, it should be possible to transfer The Complete Works of Shakespeare to memory by ingesting a pill, to master the multiplication tables by injection into the bloodstream, or to become fluent in a foreign language by having it deposited under the skin; a whole new meaning would be given to the notion of ‘swallowing the dictionary’. McConnell and Ungar believed they had shown that memories were stored in chemicals that could be transferred from animal to animal.