In Part I, I talked about Aristotle. Now let’s jump ahead a couple thousand years or so to the present and think about how neuroscience understands memory and what that means for memoirists.

If you are writing a memoir, you are working with memory.

But what is memory? Humans have used every possible discipline—philosophy, literature, psychology, biology, film, computer science—to explore this question, and we can use their work to understand better how we can use memory when we write.