“Reading is like a software update for your brain.

Whenever you learn a new concept or idea, the ‘software' improves. You download new features and fix old bugs.

In this way, reading a good book can give you a new way to view your life experiences. Your past is fixed, but your interpretation of it can change depending on the software you use to... See more

Human memory is not an archive. It is associative, embodied, contextual, emotional. We do not think in folders. We do not retrieve meaning through backlinks. Our minds are improvisational. They forget on purpose.

In A Primer for Forgetting, scholar and critic Lewis Hyde explores the idea that forgetting can be as useful as remembering—and that, in fact, the two are not opposed but work in concert with each other. This idea sparked for him when he was studying the importance of memory, and in reading about the old oral cultures who passed knowledge through... See more