The Weird Power of “Transactive Memory”

We store a lot of our knowledge in people’s heads

Clive Thompson
6 min readJul 14, 2023
Photo by Harli Marten on Unsplash

In the last few months, I’ve occasionally been fumbling around for words. I’ll try to remember the name of a movie star or historical event or a book, and — it’s not there. I can’t pull it up.

What’s wrong with my brain?

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Clive Thompson

I write 2X a week on tech, science, culture — and how those collide. Writer at NYT mag/Wired; author, “Coders”. @clive@saturation.social clive@clivethompson.net