Six years ago, Michael Kinsley—not, at the time, working for the magazine—popped by the headquarters of The New Republic, where I was then an intern. He needed a place to work for a stretch and ended up in my cramped office (that’s right, interns in an office!). He kindly offered me a cookie. He spoke on the phone about William F. Buckley, Jr., who had died that day. Three days later, his remembrances were published in The New York Times, including the time Buckley dropped his trousers and urinated in front of him in a parking garage.

The thing is, I didn’t remember any of that, or barely anything; who remembers the time they were offered a cookie six years ago? (Perhaps I would have fared better had bodily functions been involved.) After reading a recent article by Kinsley in The New Yorker, I remembered that I had met him and turned to my trusty Gchat archive. A few searches later, and I had it: a veritable liveblog of Kinsley’s actions between 1:52 p.m. and 3:14 p.m., tapped out to my then-boyfriend, one poorly punctuated line after another. The reconstructed anecdote was much more complete than what I could have offered by relying solely on my memory, which would have been along the lines of: one time Michael Kinsley came to The New Republic’s office and I met him. Gripping stuff, that.

What qualifies as a memory in an age when technology provides unprecedented options for the recording of information? Semantic memory—the ability to recall state capitals, say, or when William F. Buckley, Jr. died—has become increasingly irrelevant, usurped by Google as the data-sifter par excellence. But narrative and autobiographical memory are something altogether different. When I read over my Gchat, I remembered the event—the look of the office, my feelings for that boyfriend—in a way that the terse words on the screen couldn’t supply. But what if I couldn’t add in those details myself, couldn’t overlay my sensory and emotional perceptions onto the factual record? Would the knowledge that the event occurred suffice for me to claim this as my memory?

A rash of new literature grapples with the problem of memory in an age when technology has both overcome and highlighted the limits of the human brain’s recall. By exploring the intersection between memory, memoir-writing, and science, these books concern themselves not with standard memories—those fungible grab-bags of emotional resonance and sense perception—but with the shadows surrounding those impressions, the edges that the authors can’t quite grasp. These books and essays ask how understanding the brain’s mechanics can change the experience we have inside our heads.

The paths to a fragmented memory are legion. Susannah Cahalan’s best-selling memoir Brain on Fire chronicles her month-long plunge into psychiatric distress as a rare disease wreaked havoc on her mind. (She relied on medical records and interviews with everyone from doctors to family members and other such evidence to piece her experience back together.) In another recent memoir, The Answer to the Riddle Is Me: A Memoir of Amnesia, David Maclean recounts waking up on a train platform in Hyderabad with no idea of who he was or how he got there. An allergic reaction to the anti-malarial drug Lariam left Maclean hallucinating in a foreign mental institution, without even a sense of his own appearance. (He recounted this in a segment on “This American Life.”) There are the memoirs of dementia: Gerda Saunders’s Telling Who I Am Before I Forget: My Dementia, from which this recent, much-talked about essay about being diagnosed with microvascular disease, a leading cause of dementia, was adapted. “I’ll report my descent into the post-cerebral realm for which I am headed,” she writes.