Psychologists and neurologists used to know the boundaries of memory. Few people could remember anything before age three, probably because they had too little cortex and no language. Intelligence was not expected of the unborn, and even newborns were called a "brainstem preparation", obviously not equipped for perception and memory. Anything that seemed like memory was called a "fantasy".

In medicine, brain and body were different realms. Clear boundaries separated the nervous system, endocrine system, and immune system, marking off the territory of specialists. A brain in coma or under general anesthesia was not expected to remember anything. Brain death would, of course, wipe out all memory.

In psychology departments, memory, learning, communication, and personality were taught in separate courses and probably had different developmental schedules. Consciousness was considered unsuitable for scientific study, and thinking was taught in the philosophy department. That was how it was.

Today, however, most of these carefully set boundaries have been breached; in retrospect we can see they were illusions of convenience. Scientists now cross all disciplinary lines to probe the outer limits of memory and to scrutinize its microscopic pathways and incredible biochemistry. New discoveries make old theories quickly obsolete. At present, no theory comprehends all the known facts of memory, but a holistic approach is replacing the atomistic approach of the past.

And in the light of evidence from the farther reaches of memory, accessed in nonordinary states of consciousness indicating that storage of memory is outside the body-brain, we can even now ask ourselves: Is memory perhaps an innate and ageless endowment of human consciousness?