Our obsession with youth, too, turns out to have a cultural root. Sophie described a body of scientific work that shows that, when you ask people to talk about their lives, they don’t tend to bring things up randomly from across their life. Instead they tell you mostly about events from their twenties. ‘It’s thought that your brain might work differently in your twenties and you’re laying down more memories,’ she said. ‘That’s part of the explanation. But more recently somebody did an experiment
