Every day there seems to be more to remember: more names, more passwords, more appointments. With a memory like Ben Pridemore’s, I imagined, life would be qualitatively different - and better. Our culture constantly inundates us with new information, and yet our brains capture so little of it. Most just goes in one ear and out the other. If the point of reading were simply to retain knowledge, it would probably be the single least efficient activity I engage in. I can spend a half dozen hours reading a book and then have only a foggy notion of what it was about. All those fact and anecdotes, even the stuff interesting enough to be worth understanding, have a habit of briefly making an impression on me and then disappearing into who knows where. There are books on my shelf that I can’t even remember whether I’ve read or not.
What would it mean to have all that otherwise-lost knowledge at my fingertips? I couldn’t help but think that it would make me more persuasive, more confident, and, in some fundamental sense, smarter. Certainly I’d be a better journalist, friend, and boyfriend. But more than that, I imagined that having a memory like Ben Pridemore’s would make me an altogether more attentive, perhaps even wiser, person. To the extent that experience is the sum of our memories and wisdom is the sum of experiences, having a better memory would mean knowing not only more about the world, but also more about myself. Surely, some of the forgetting that seems to plague us is healthy and necessary. If I didn’t forget so many of the dumb things I’ve done, I’d probably be unbearably neurotic. But hot many worthwhile ideas have gone unthought and connections unmade because of my memory’s shortcomings?

You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view… until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.