You can always recall that at some point in childhood you discovered that you could decide to remember certain moments. You would say to yourself, "Now", let this be remembered," and you would make a careful inventory of yourself perceiving the world around you, including your intention to remember it. Because of the reflexive nature of such an event it was placed in the same category of experiences as trying to see yourself looking into a mirror that was facing another mirror, something else you were able to do in your childhood home by way of a certain cocktail-cabinet whose inner walls were all mirrors. These special memories could be recalled with an especial vividness and they were lodged in a distinctive way in the temporal map of the life you inhabited, as if they were both milestones and portals, since by concentrating on them you could almost re-inhabit the original moment. They gave you the sense that you could re-enter its sense of presence by way of the tunnel generated by the infinite regress of mirror reflections. One dimension of time extended into the warm grey shadows in the direction of your earlier childhood and birth and an orthogonal dimension extended from the always present now into the always presence of every now. What you could not have known was that in deliberately remembering an event you were using a distinct capacity of your developing brain, that you were activating the memory control in the pre-frontal lobes rather than just the continuous registration of experience in the temporal region. These brain capacities have evolved for good reasons which one could doubtless infer, but the sense of it was something like learning to use some of the unusual new features that are included in a car you have just bought. There is a sense of gratification that the creators of this vehicle have anticipated some of your less-obvious desires, that the capacity to take advantage of these features was already there before you got into the car, and that their presence causes you to feel so much more at home in it.