I have a poor memory, but I hold to a certain comfort that Albert Einstein had a bad memory, too. It was reported that Albert Einstein couldn't even remember his own telephone number. He said that he never remembered anything that he could look up. But that sounds like a pretty lame excuse to me.

Memory is a mystery of the brain. How does information get stored, coded, and then retrieved in the brain? We don't know how. Do all sense impressions, everything that happens to us, all that we hear and see, get stored into the cells, waiting for the right code to bring it out as memory?

What happens when we forget, apart from brain disease, brain trauma or injury? What is forgetting for? Does forgetting serve some salutary purpose in our lives? Why is it that with age you can recall childhood expe…