Because the human memory, unlike a computer's circuits, is not a written text, it operates in a manner remarkably similar to those primitive cultures without reading and writing, cultures that must learn their collective stories by heart and constantly maintain their stock of stories through repetition. What constitutes a self or an identity is a set of memories-turned-into-stories, memories shared by the successive series of personae occupying an individual mind. And like the most ancient mythologist, we tend to remember according to the needs of memory

Timothy Adams, Telling Lies