Introduction: The Invention of Modern Memory

Abstract

I first became interested in memory, the subject of this book, during the early 1990s, after I turned forty and, ironically but not surprisingly, began gradually to lose my own. There is nothing dramatic or tragic about this process (so far), which has merely measured the slow but inexorable passage of time and the apparently inevitable diminution of a faculty that I once took for granted. Like most people entering middle age, I suspect, I began to wonder about the significance of a language that had previously seemed unremarkable: what did apparently simple phrases such as “commit to memory” or “keep in my head” really mean when I attempted to describe that which I seemed to be losing?