From the standpoint of cognitive theory, the problem is about being overwhelmed by stories that we cannot process. Our minds construct gists of memory immediately after an experience or the hearing of a story, and unless we have a dramatic experience, or have a particular reason to constantly recite the story of the experience, it slowly diminishes in our memory. Retrieval of a given story for application at the point that we are analyzing something or making a judgment naturally becomes more difficult the farther away we are in time from that originating story.

In oral culture, we humans learned to store the stories as epigrams, little tales that had a meaningful proverb at the end. The constant repetition of epigrammatic tales gave us a stock supply of references to put to appropriate use, like the hundreds of cowboy sayings I grew up with in Texas, to apply to a wide range of situations. In our current culture, many of us have not developed an epigrammatic learning equivalent to these processes.

At the same time, we are bombarded with millions of indigestible, literally unmemorable, story fragments every time we pick up a phone, bump into a friend, watch TV, listen to the radio, read a book or a newspaper, or browse the Web. We cannot process these into epigrams, recite and retain them, and so they become a jumble of fragments that actually inhibit our ability to construct a coherent story.

Only people who develop effective filtering, indexing, and repackaging tools in their minds can manage to successfully and consistently articulate meaning that reconstructs as a coherent story. We think of the skilled professionals in any given field as having developed this process for their specialty. They can tell appropriate stories–the memory of cases for a trial lawyer, for example–based on having systematized a portion of their memories. But most skilled professionals have difficulty crossing over into using examples outside their field, from their personal life or nonprofessional experience. Those who do, we often describe as storytellers.

This is one of the arguments for the lifelong Memory Box as a retrieval/filtering/construction system to assist us in this process. Images, videos, sounds, and other representations of events from our life can help us to reconstruct more complete memories and therefore expand the repertoire of story that we can put to use.