In fact the flexibility of our memories makes it relatively easy because we can meld all these different memories together seamlessly to invent a new imaginary scene, one which we have never even contemplated before,...

I see the last two millennia as laid out in columns, like a reverse ledger sheet. It’s as if I’m standing at the top of the twenty-first century looking downwards to 2000. Future centuries float...

Medieval illustrations of the mind from the fourteenth century depict memories like snakes feeding into the imagination and, long before this, both Aristotle and Galen described memories not as archives of our lives, but as...