Between the mid-teens and the mid-twenties, the human brain records an unusually rich collection of memories—not because it works better than before or after, but because life is packed with firsts th

Ask most adults over forty to list the memories that come back to them unprompted, and a strange pattern shows up. They do not distribute evenly across a life. They cluster. Disproportionately, they come from somewhere between the ages of about ten a... [6087 chars]