Benedict Carey was born March 3rd, 1960 in California and originally had a degree in mathematics. He was a freelance writer for in Los Angeles before writing health and fitness for the New York Times. He then became a science reporter where he lives in New York for the New York Times and has been since 2004. Carey is one of the most emailed reporters.
Carey has several outstanding reviews from media and average everyday readers. Carey’s How We Learn research book on memory and learning is linked to the story of a man who is known to science and the world, Henry Molaison. Molaison was a memory disorder patient who had two thirds of his brain removed to cure his epilepsy, yet was still able to learn and contribute …show more content…
It comes across the so called ‘enemies of learning’ in which we see as distractions, laziness, interruptions, going off topic, forgetfulness and even quitting. These enemies are not all bad according to Benedict Carey. He makes these distractions and forgetfulness a good part of the brain and its learning process as he states, “ Using memory, changes memory- and for the better. Forgetting enables and deepens learning by filtering out the distracting information and by allowing some breakdown that, after reuse drives retrieval and storage strength higher than they were originally” (Carey 40). Using this quote from Carey we can derive that not all forgetting is a terrible bad thing. It becomes a part of our life where anyone as a human can use their current memory and will forget something in their past in which they don't want to recall …show more content…
Overall this book is not annoying, but there is definitely faulty reasoning throughout. Learning is a process in which changes for each individual, that changes alone with personal counts, and mental capacity. Learning is something that we learn all in different ways. As Carey states in the last line of his book “Learning is, after all, what you do” (Carey 222).
Where I am not completely in love with this book, the flaws however in How We Learn by Benedict Carey are limited. The one flaw I found was the writing style. I personally do not like how the book is organized. It is a long and choppy kind of book. There are personal connections that he makes that I can’t connect to or relate to in anyway. The pictures printed throughout are somewhat helpful but become distracting. I am not sure if they are meant to be distracting as he talks about distraction being a good thing but to an extent becomes non