“In that book which is my memory,
On the first page of the chapter that is the day when I first met you,
Appear the words, ‘Here begins a new life’.”   (Dante, Vita Nuova [*])

A model for memory that has survived from ancient times until the computer age is that a thought is stored in a place in the mind, and that it is retrieved from that space when it is recalled.  The actions of creating and recalling memories were viewed as parallel to those of writing and reading a text.

The model is so persistent that we even speak of computers writing to and reading from memory.

The metaphor of memory as book can lead to a devaluation of memory and the view that memory involves verbatim recall of texts.