There is no fixed, stable ‘you’—only a collection of related mental imprints over time. The continuity between these states is more tenuous than it appears: our memories are generated afresh each time we access them, with most of the fine details fabricated. Outside of the worst cases of arrested development, we’re much more like a series of differ

We are frequently the very last people to know what is at work within ‘us’. We suffer because there is no easy route to introspection. We cannot open a hatch and locate ‘ourselves’. We are not a fixed destination, but an eternally mobile, boundless, unfocused, vaporous spectre whose full nature can only be retrospectively deduced from painfully rec

Memory is more of a self-serving dynamic revision machine: you remember the last time you remembered the event and, without realizing it, change the story at every subsequent remembrance.