“I wrote this book out of my experiences during thirty years of teaching at the Collège de France.   In it I look both at culture and art – music and painting – as well as life in society, ethics, and the meaning of death; languages and writing, as well as the neural and molecular bases of memory and learning.   This book is a fresco that brings together a great amount of varied data, discussions, and hypotheses. It anchors the substance of contemporary science in the history