The quotation comes from the South African poet Roy Campbell and refers to the work of South African novelists of the earlier years of this century. The sentiment is, however, much more widely applicable, and it could, without too much distortion, be applied to the work over the last 50 years of students of memory such as myself. Science needs controlled observation and hence is always open to the risk that excessive control, “the snaffle and the curb,” may stifle the phenomenon that is being observed, “the bloody horse.” Such a criticism is not, of course, novel: “If X is an interesting or socially significant aspect of memory, then psychologists have hardly ever studied X” (Neisser, 1978, p. 4).

The tension between the need for control and the need to preserve the essence of the phenomenon under investigation has been present since the scientific study of memory began 100 years ago, with two investigators both beginning to tackle the question of how human memory could best be studied. In Germany, Ebbinghaus opted for a highly constrained experimental approach in which the phenomena of memory were stripped down to the minimum, with everything rigidly controlled. If it proved difficult to hold something constant, as was the case with meaning, then every effort was made to exclude it from the study.