David Brooks in today's NYTimes posits The Great Forgetting. A pretty hilarious, but insightful piece on personal and societal memory lapses.

"In the era of an aging population, memory is the new sex...Society is now riven between the memory haves and the memory have-nots.

Neural environmentalists will emerge from the slow foods movement, urging people to accept memory loss as a way to reduce their mental footprint. Meanwhile, mnemonic gurus will emerge offering to sell neural Viagra, but the only old memories the pills really bring back will involve trigonometry."