The Hunger Games trilogy gave me bad dreams. Actually,
the books provided images, feelings, and ideas that my brain
used as ingredients to brew up nightmares about children’s
bones floating in a river of red dust and creepy lizard mutts
lurking in the storm drain outside my front door. My brain is
good at that sort of thing. But dreaming wasn’t the only business
my brain was doing while I slept. It was also forming memories.
That is why I remember Greasy Sae’s concoction of mouse
meat and pig entrails, Prim’s untucked shirt, and, of course,
Katniss, the girl on fire.

You probably remember why Katniss called Prim “little
duck.” It’s a detail that’s important to the story. But—unless you
share my personal fascination with mice and nasty-bad soup—Sae’s recipe isn’t stashed in long-term memory. That’s because
every individual has a unique brain in charge of selecting information
and forming memories. Depending on our previous
experiences, we notice some things and ignore others. In the process,
we build an ever-more-specialized system for dealing with
the world. We can donate a kidney or a chunk of liver or a pint
of blood to someone else and those cells have a good chance of
being useful, but the brain and the memories in it can’t be transplanted.
Brains are weird, custom-made, do-it-yourself projects.

The Hunger Games is an especially good series to read with
 …