You’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who would deny that we are living through an age of staggering cultural change, and that has as one of its more salient features a generalized decline in human attentional capacities, as well as individual and collective memories. 

Whether this change is environmentally induced by, for example, the enormous and historically unprecedented amount of information available to each of us on a daily basis, or the increasingly disembodied way in which that same information is dispensed and consumed, I cannot be sure. 

What I do know, however, is that the tandem of attention and memory (the former is the obligatory precondition for the activation of the latter) are among the most basic and important cognitive functions we have as human beings. This is why both of these elements of our minds have been the object of constant speculation among philosophers for centuries. And without them, as anyone who has lived with a loved one with Alzheimer’s knows, our individuality and our core identities rapidly dissipate. 

Cultural institutions are the place where our individual experiences of the past are melded into something approaching a collective historical heritage. At least that’s what we are often told.