Pieces of Light

If memory is fallible and prone to reconstructive errors, that may be because it is oriented towards the future at least as much as towards the past. Some of the most exciting recent research in this area has shown that similar neural systems are involved in both autobiographical memory and future thinking, and that they both rely on a form of imagination.

CASTING A LINE ‘#8216;Can you remember?’#8217; It starts with a question from my 7-year-old son. We are in the grounds of our rented cottage in the Baixa Alentejo, killing time before we head to the Algarve coast for a boat trip. With his holiday money, Isaac has bought himself a hand-held toy that fires little foam rockets prodigious distances up into the air, and he has lost one of them on the grav