Books

Have you ever heard a claim about memory and thought, “Waaaait. Is that true”? For instance, can stress really sear details into an eyewitnesses’ memory? Is that how memory works?

In The Handsome Kidnapper, Penningroth explores intriguing aspects of real-life memory. Taking a Mythbusters approach, she scrutinizes 15 claims, including the possibility that moderate stress levels during one attempted kidnapping helped the victim remember more details. Plausible? Or not? To reach a verdict, Penningroth reports on the latest findings on how stress and emotions affect what people remember.

In a similar fashion, 14 other little mysteries are fact checked against science. Is it possible to remember your life from before age one? Can the police unearth memories in eyewitnesses by hypnotizing them? Was a wife’s sudden amnesia caused by having sex with her husband? Can scientists delete a bad memory (like in that Jim Carrey movie)? Does red wine boost your memory?

The journey through various memory claims unfolds through four sections, each representing a particularly hot area of research:  autobiographical memory, eyewitness memory, extreme forgetting, and memory improvement. Throughout The Handsome Kidnapper, Penningroth sprinkles in humor, drawings, and celebrity anecdotes. There’s no better way to learn about the latest from memory research and have fun doing it.

Dr. Penningroth was a tenured psychology professor at the University of Wyoming. But as a self-proclaimed “scientific journal junkie,” she left academia to write full-time, translating research findings into engaging stories. Her research has been published in journals such as Memory and European Journal of Ageing. She has delivered dozens of talks, including an address on memory and aging at the AARP National Spelling Bee, which is hilarious if you know what a bad speller she is.