This is the time to remember

PHOTO (COLOR): Do you remember your first car, your first apartment, yourfirst job? Chances are you do. Memories of young adulthood are likely to be among your clearest and fondest recollections, a Duke University psychologist has found, no matter how old you are. Memories tend to cluster in the years between ages 10 and 30, says David Rubin, Ph.D. He offers several possible explanations. Perhaps we recall events from our teens and twenties because so many of them were "firsts," and their novelty made them memorable. It may be that the emotion and excitement that accompanied these events vividly I imprinted them on our minds. Or perhaps our early attempts to establish stability provide a sort of template for adulthood. Possibly, it is nothing about the memories themselves that make them better remembered, but how they are stored in the brain. We're at our sharpest mentally when we're young, and so have more mental resources to efficiently encode information. That, in turn, makes them easier to retrieve--and reminisce over--later on.