Credit: Markku Lahdesmaki/Corbis

And so, I allow myself at last to understand, I am programmed like everyone to forget these earliest years – and because of this amnesia, forget that I've experienced every second of every minute before. To cope with my eternal life I must believe it is the first time, every time.

In shock, I drop my plastic hammer on the grass. I'm a fool. I will never change the world with some ridiculous childhood announcement.

I know this because I can still remember the sweep of my life even as the details slide away from my clutching hands. I do remember being driven throughout my life to understand the brain and consciousness.

I am going to forget the truth but retain some unconscious drive to tell that truth. I'll become a neuroscientist and dedicate my career to solving a problem that I knew the answer to when I was 18 months old.

Another bee buzzes past my head, distracting me. What was I thinking again? Oh, yes. I pick up my plastic hammer. Daddy will be impressed if I can hammer the blue peg in. Next to me, my sister plays with some wooden blocks with letters on them, clumsily arranging them in a row. Neither of us can read the word she has made.

As I pound ineptly with my hammer, I have a hazy awareness that my brain is continuing its natural growth, pruning away more of my neurons, losing more connections. A memory of something Einstein had once written in a letter stirs in my mind:

Nobody is ever lost. Each of us will always exist in a given region of space-time, perfectly preserved as though trapped in amber.

What the famous physicist hadn't remembered, when he wrote those words to comfort a grieving relative ... what was the physicist's name again? ... was that his consciousness is also trapped in his own space-time amber, destined to loop forever.

The fragment of memory fades away.