About Claudia Hammond: Claudia Hammond is British author, occasional TV presenter, and frequent radio presenter with the BBC World Service and BBC Radio 4.
Medieval illustrations of the mind from the fourteenth century depict memories like snakes feeding into the imagination and, long before this, both Aristotle and Galen described memories not as archives of our lives, but as tools for the imagination.
I see the last two millennia as laid out in columns, like a reverse ledger sheet. It's as if I'm standing at the top of the twenty-first century looking downwards to 2000. Future centuries float as a gauzy sheet stretching over to the left. I also se...
In fact the flexibility of our memories makes it relatively easy because we can meld all these different memories together seamlessly to invent a new imaginary scene, one which we have never even contemplated before, let alone witnessed. The flexibil...
