片中人物：
因为缺少对自我的意识而不能记事的广大儿童；因海马体受损而缺少对过去场景的记忆、因而也不能想象筹划未来、无忧无虑地生活在当下的青年男子；试图在伤痛往事浮现时一把抓住它、用药物修改记忆的女子；患上阿兹海默症、失去做事能力、只能靠跑步维持当下生活意义的老人， 他说：“The future? Foget it. I mean, just keep on going, because if you don't keep doing things, you'll just die very quickly.” 比起海马体受损的青年，老人的记忆缺陷更为严重，已经失去生活自理能力。他能否像现代灵修方案所指教的那样享受当下，即使是在最好的情况下、在跑步中呢？
Some notes:
Bob believes that this is evidence that the sense of self is necessary for children to start to form memories for events happened to them."So this is key to the onset of autobiographical memory. Before that, we may have memories of events, we may have memories of things occured, but not things that occured to us. They're just things. What makes these events more memorable, or makes them autobiographical, is the emergence of the self. And now these events aren't just simply events, they're events that happened to me." …Autobiographical memory is quite a different thing from our ability to learn facts.
The hippocampi are crucial to our memory, because without us even knowing it, it receive information from every single event that we have. The hippocampi appear never to sleep, because it register every episode, every moment as it unfolds. … But in the case of John, even things that are important are forgotten, as his hippocampi are not automatically registering every moment of his life.
The neuro-activities are remarkably similar when people are thinking about either the past or the future. … And Donna believes, this is because we piece together fragments of memory to creat an idea of the future.…For John, the implications are bleak. Because he can't draw on any past experiences, he's unable to mentally take travel into the future. So John is trapped in the present. He doesn't plan for the future. He is very happy-go-lucky. But the flip side of this, is when John is asked about the future, he's stumped.
To form each connection, the cells grow towards each other so that signals can past more readily between them. But how these connections represent experience is not understood. How could something so complex as our memory, be xx through mere connections between cells? You're asking the most fundamental question in brain research. It's not specifically memory, it's how do we represent things, even here and now, how do I store what you looks like in the context of these connections amongst brain cells? And memory also has that challenge, because not only is it representing what you look like, in some way it represent what you look like yesterday.
The recalling of memory makes it malleable again. When you bring your memory back, it becomes fluid again, and it needs to be recorded again. That's the most recent finding, because we used to think that only new memories were initially fluid and malleable.
…Why memory change as you age. One key part of the brain is what we call the white matter. These are the cables that connects different parts of the brain, which allows these parts to communicate with each other. If you look here at the 50-year-old brain, you don't see any changes in the white matter. This is the healthy brain. As we move on to an 80-year-old, we can see very dramatic changes in the white matter. And, the reason why we think that the white matter change as we're aging, is the blood flow supplied to the brain isn't as healthy as it was when we were young. And this cause the cables that connect different regions to die. As a result, thinking becomes impaired.
