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When a person steps away, the pattern does not go out all at once. The thin outer loops vanish first, then the rings; the dense core holds longest.

This is how a person forgets. In 1885 Hermann Ebbinghaus memorised meaningless syllables and measured how much remained after an hour, a day, a week. The curve drops steeply at first and flattens later, and what was repeated more often holds longer. The lace fades along the power-law forgetting curve described from Ebbinghaus’s data^*: each loop has its own “memory time”, accumulated through attention.

* The power-law form of the forgetting curve on Ebbinghaus’s data was shown by John Wixted and Ebbe Ebbesen in 1991.

Between two places where a person lingered, a thread lies down. No one stood there — the lace completes the connection on its own.

In 1932 Frederic Bartlett asked people to retell a story after days and months. No one reproduced it literally: each filled in what was missing so that it held together. Memory does not replay a recording; it assembles the event anew from what is left and fills the gaps. The connecting thread on the floor is a gap filled in.

The pattern grows only around the person standing, and the farther from the feet, the thinner it is. Beyond the edge of the circle nothing is woven. The longer the stop, the wider the circle — up to two metres.

Attention is wider than a point; it settles as a spot with a soft edge. In 1986 Charles Eriksen and James St. James compared it to a zoom lens: the longer you look, the wider the field. And only what falls inside the spot is written into memory. A passing step leaves a thread; a stop leaves lace.

A person returns to a place where they already stood. The old pattern comes back to life exactly under the returning feet, and a new one begins to grow beside it.

In 2000 Karim Nader showed that each time a memory is retrieved, it becomes fragile and is rewritten anew. Each time we remember, we get a fresh version, slightly different. Returning does not restore the previous pattern — it weaves the next one over it.

While something new is being woven in one zone, the old lace beside it fades faster. Each new stop is a layer under which earlier traces age.

For decades Elizabeth Loftus studied how new information changes what is already recorded: witnesses “remembered” details that never existed if those details were suggested after the event. The new arrives and changes the conditions in which the old holds.

Lace is knots and the connections between them. Small patterns flare up at the walker’s steps, each lighting up at once, whole.

An engram is the trace of memory in the brain. Richard Semon named it in 1904, and in 2012 Susumu Tonegawa’s laboratory used light to switch on the cells that had been active during memorisation, and a mouse remembered something that was not happening. A single memory is a group of cells that flare up together. The memory is stored in the pattern of connections between them. The filet net — knots, voids, connections — is built the same way. Hence the lace.