What Effect Does Aging Have On Memory? ‘It seems, then, that we owe to memory almost all that we either have or are; that our ideas and conceptions are its work, and that our everyday perception, thought, and movement is derived from this source. Memory collects the countless phenomena of our existence into a single whole; and, as our bodies would be scattered into the dust of their component atoms if they were not held together by the attraction of matter, so our consciousness would be broken up into as many fragments as we have lived seconds but for the binding and unifying force of memory’. (Hering, 1920, as cited in Atkinson et al., 1993) Hering’s words