This slipping-away of knowledge is always happening. It happens in our minds, as memories fade. But arguably, we don’t need to retain all knowledge.

People are made of stories. Our memories are not the impartial accumulation of every second we’ve lived; they’re the narrative that we assembled out of selected moments. Which is why, even when we’ve experienced the same events as other individuals, we never constructed identical narratives: the criteria used for selecting moments were different f

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