The retention of memories from our life has always been a source of great interest on the part of philosophers as well as biologists and, more recently, psychologists. Now, with the ongoing revolution of the neural sciences, we are learning much more about how memories are formed, retained, forgotten and revised.

We are ourselves a rich source of expertise regarding many matters. While we don’t always fully appreciate this expertise and often distort or make poor use of this personal expertise, it is there for our use – thanks to our capacity to process at multiples in our brain at the same time, and thanks to the recent expansion in the human brain of an advanced mental processing system (the prefrontal cortex).