When You Want To Get

Woodworking Requires A Completely Different Kind Of Thinking And Problem-solving Ability Than Writing. With Writing, You Take A Set Of Facts And Ideas, And You Reason Your Way Forward To A Story That Pulls Them Together. With Woodworking, You Start With An End Product In Mind, And Reason Your Way Backward To The Raw Wood.

Our Ability To Find Humor In The World, To Make Connections Between Previously Unconnected Notions, To Create New Ideas, To Share In A Common Culture: All These Essentially Human Acts Depend On Memory.

Our Culture Is An Edifice Built Of Externalized Memories.

We've Outsourced Our Memories To Digital Devices, And The Result Is That We No Longer Trust Our Memories. We See Every Small Forgotten Thing As Evidence That They're Failing Us.

I Met With Amnesiacs And Savants, Educators And Scientists, To Try To Understand What Memory Is, Why It Works, Why It Sometimes Doesn't, And What Its Potential Might Be.