Moreover, modern science sharpens the point. The brain rewires with learning; synapses strengthen and prune across the lifespan. Recalling a memory can even render it malleable and subject to updating, a process called reconsolidation (Nader, Schafe, and LeDoux 2000). Psychologists also describe the “end of history illusion”: adults believe they have changed a lot up to now but will change little henceforth, a bias documented by Quoidbach, Gilbert, and Wilson in Science (2013). Alice resists that illusion; she expects tomorrow’s self to differ again. [...]
