We don't want a memory that is going to store every bit of every experience. We would be overwhelmed with clutter of useless trivia ... We're probably better off having ... a more selective coding of info.

Memory is not a simple replay. The bits of information that we recover from the past are often influenced by our knowledge, beliefs and feelings.

This is a source of great worry for some people. Without memory, we wouldn't be able to perform basic skills. We wouldn't have a sense of self. We wouldn't be able to remember our personal experiences.

They can send them to retailers online. They can drop their flash memory off. They get their films scanned. And by doing that, they can get it in more places faster and at a very competitive cost, and that will grow the whole pictures business.

[Memory]... is a system of near-infinite complexity, a system that seems designed for revision as much as for replication, and revision unquestionably occurs. Details from separate experiences weave together, so that the rememberer thinks of them as having happened together. The actual year or season or time of day shifts to a different one. Many details are lost, usually in ways that serve the self in its present situation, not the self of ten or twenty or forty years ago when the remembered event took place. And even the fresh memory, the 'original,' is not reliable in a documentary sense....Memory, in short, is not a record of the past but an evolving myth of understanding the psyche spins from its engagement with the world.

You know the saying a rolling stone gathers no moss? I'm the opposite. I've gathered too much, and when one thing happens, it brings up everything else that's ever been similar to it. I don't just feel things once and then move on. I fell them over and over again, and the only new thing is whatever precipitated the memory of the old, so it never really feels new at all. Everything just gets integrated into one big giant ball...