"...a friend of mine was explaining how she had to move these pixels around a computer and had to add at the least 20 MB of memory to handle the operation. I had the disquieting thought that all this memory she was adding had to come from somewhere. Maybe it was coming from me because I couldn't remember a thing that day and then it became blindingly obvious all the memory that everybody keeps adding to computers comes from people. Every time somebody adds memory to a machine, thousands of people forget everything they knew."
- from Andre Codrescu 101 Damnations
Radiolab "Memory and Forgetting" (LINK)