 Brilliant's Audio presents Adventures in Memory, the Science and Secrets of Remembering and Forgetting by Hilda Östby and Ilva Östby. Translated into English by Marianne Lindwall. Performed by Christel Lewis. Forward. Sam Keane. In one of Plutarch's lives, he mentions an old philosophical conundrum now called the Ship of Theseus Paradox. After slaying the minotaur in the labyrinth, the Greek hero Theseus sails home, and the people of Athens are so overjoyed that they preserve his ship as a memorial. Being a material object, however, the ship shows somewhere in terror as the years pass, and every so often the caretakers have to replace a piece of it. A board here, a plank there. Eventually, after several centuries, they've replaced every last original piece of wood. So is it still the same ship now that it was at the beginning? You can ask a similar question about our own bodies. We're three fourths water, molecules of which cycle into and out of us in a constant flow, never sticking around long. And because our DNA and other biomolecules break down, we swap in new parts all the time to repair them. Skin cells get recycled every few weeks, blood cells every few months, liver cells every two years, even bone experiences constant turnover. Over the course of a decade or so, every last atom in your body gets replaced. So are you still you at the end? Most of us feel intuitively that we do remain the same person from decade to decade. But how can that be if our bodies aren't the same? Why do we feel this continuity so strongly? One big reason is because of our memories. The bio bits come and go, but the pattern of information coursing through our brains remains largely consistent. In a fundamental way then, we are our memories. Yet few of us really understand how memory works. We rely on misleading analogies or folk theories, or we simply remain oblivious and take it all for granted. Memories bubble up so easily inside us, so effortlessly, that we rarely pause to consider just what a miracle they are. Well, no more. After reading Adventures in Memory, you'll fully appreciate what a compli... Sample complete. Ready to continue?