Airbrushing out and filling in

If one ever wonders just how important memory is to our selfhood, consider patients in the later stages of Alzheimer’s disease. The condition as good as demonstrates that there is no afterlife, because if you can be dead when you are alive, then you can certainly be dead when you are dead. Without memory our minds are nothing, which should have made the cynical among us realise long ago that something so important could not possibly be fully under our control. According to the research psychologist Daniel Schacter, memory is far from the passive aide we imagine — the dutiful if fallible servant who hopefully brings us what we need, when we need it. Memory is rather one who alternates nights of mischief while his lordship is away with moments of well-intentioned artifice, like the butler who concocts fan letters for his faded movie star mistress in Sunset Boulevard.

Schacter shows how our memories are constantly inventing and obscuring the truth behind our backs, plugging gaps and remoulding the past to suit the present.