Total Recall: How the E-Memory Revolution Will Change Everything (8 page)

• Episodic memory, sometimes known as autobiographical memory, encodes experiences from your past. This is what allows you to know about and reexperience the things that have happened in your life, such as the time you sprained your ankle at the playground and your father bought you an ice-cream sundae to make you feel better, or the shower you took an hour ago.

Nothing is coming soon that can help us with our procedural memory. But our semantic and episodic bio-memories can and will be extended by our e-memories.

We all know that biological memory is fallible, but it’s still extremely unnerving to learn just how true this is. As neuroscientists have shown, episodic memories feel a lot more fleshed out and precise than they really are. Unlike computers, brains aren’t all that great at faithfully storing masses of detail. What brains are best at storing are patterns, meanings, and gestalts. The act of remembering an event from your past is less like playing back a mental videotape in your mind’s home theater system than it is like telling a story based on a few relevant facts.

In an age of Total Recall, anything, even everything, is easily recorded accurately into your e-memory. Your brain can’t do this. When it lays down a new memory of an experience, what it actually encodes is a sparse constellation of authentic details and salient junctures. When your brain retrieves the memory later, it uses that constellation as a scaffold for reconstructing the original experience. As the memory plays out in your mind you may have the strong impression that it’s a high-fidelity record, but only a few of its contents are truly accurate. The rest of it is like a bunch of props, backdrops, casting extras, and stock footage.

When a friend tells you a five-minute-long humorous story, the memory you come away with isn’t the exact sequence of words he uttered. When you repeat the “same” story to your friends at work on Monday, what you actually do is reconstruct it in your own way according to the same pattern and meaning. You follow the overall map provided by those key junctures you memorized, but you freely embellish and fill in any gaps to make the story flow smoothly between them. You might repeat verbatim a few key bits of the original telling, but most of the word choices are yours. Generally, all I can remember of a joke is the great punch line that made me laugh, and I have to reinvent the rest in order to share it.

And it gets even stranger. Sometimes a feature that was confabulated during one act of remembering gets reremembered during the next act. In the process, the confabulation can become a permanent element of the bio-memory. Here’s how the eminent neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux sees it:

Like many scientists in the field of memory, I used to think that a memory is something stored in the brain and then accessed when used. Then, in 2000, a researcher in my lab [convinced us] that our usual way of thinking was wrong. In a nutshell . . . each time a memory is used, it has to be restored as a new memory in order to be accessible later. The old memory is either not there or is inaccessible. In short, your memory about something is only as good as your last memory about it. This is why people who witness crimes testify about what they read in the paper rather than what they witnessed.

False memories can have tragic consequences. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, thousands of families were ripped apart when adult children claimed that they had recovered long-repressed memories of sexual molestation when they were little. It turned out many of these “memories” had been coaxed into being by gullible, credulous therapists who hadn’t realized what they were doing.

Most of our memories are not grossly altered as our brain repeatedly remembers them, but all of us harbor at least some memories that have been radically revised, and all of our memories are susceptible to gradual mutation and drift.

That is about to change.

E-MEMORY TRANSFORMS BIO-MEMORY

Biological memory is subjective, patchy, emotion-tinged, ego-filtered, impressionistic, and mutable. Digital memory is objective, dispassionate, prosaic, and unforgivingly accurate.

In our brains, memory, attention, and emotion conspire to warp, compress, and edit time and life experience in many ways. A video camera, the eye of an e-memory, in contrast, never blinks or winces, never drifts into a daydream or does a double take. A camera will record an hour of pedestrian crosswalk traffic with the same fidelity as it will witness an hour of bloody genocide.

E-memory will be the fact checker for those meanings, definitions, and concepts in our semantic memories. You probably already use Google or Wikipedia to look things like this up, when you can. But not everything you know is easy to find on the Web, or may not even be there. It will be there in your e-memory. And it will be easier to find, because you will be searching just your own memories, not the whole Web. I often find it is faster to use MyLifeBits to track down obscure facts I know I’ve been exposed to before but can’t recall directly, simply because I’ll often remember when or where or from whom I heard the thing I’m trying to recall.

Everyone knows the anxiety and frustration of not being able to remember someone’s name. With MyLifeBits I often track down a name using clues I do remember. I recently wanted to find the name of a fellow who nearly contributed to the Computer History Museum in 1983. I recalled the company he worked for. I thought he came to a lecture at the museum that same year. I wondered if his name was on the list of attendees, a copy of which I had kept in a box for years and then scanned. . . . Yes! In general, if I know that my e-memory has it, I will usually find it within a minute or two.

E-memory will become vital to our episodic memory. As you live your life, your personal devices will capture whatever you decide to record. Bio-memories fade, vanish, merge, and mutate with time, but your digital memories are unchanging. And e-memories will contain an unprecedented level of detail. With my bio-memory, I struggle to recall exactly when I was in San Francisco last year. With my GPS logged, I can recall the exact time of my walking down each individual street in San Francisco.

Total Recall will change how we think about our lives. It will also change how we feel about our lives.

Consider just one photo that popped up on my screensaver while I worked on this book. I glanced at it and was transported back to my fourth birthday in 1938. Mother told me I could invite anyone I wanted to my party, and so I did. We were an eclectic bunch, all eighteen of us ranging in age from two to fourteen. I’m in the middle front with a large sheet cake on my lap. It’s obvious that I’ve got more important things on my mind than getting my picture taken, like sticking my pudgy fingers into the creamy frosting, which although white, hid a middle that was pure devil’s food.

The faces in the picture spark recollections, like the really cute three-year-old girl from across the street, sitting in the front row with me. When my sister was born two years later, I picked the name Sharon, after that little girl, my first sweetheart, Sharon Lee. We were framed by my older teenage cousins, one with his hands in his pockets, looking ever so cool, while the other was praying for the photograph to be over. Glancing at each face, I was struck by one in particular. His name was Joe Bill, the minister’s son. He died a year later at the age of ten and it bothers me as much today as it did then.

This single picture from 1938 initiates an avalanche of memories, each connected to the other, via associations established in my brain decades ago. They elicit feelings of pleasure and sadness. Each strand tugs on a dozen others, all of them connected into the vast web of memories that make me uniquely me.

I recall a research demonstration at Microsoft headquarters of a huge grid of LCD monitors, three high and six wide, all filled with a time line displaying photos from my life. I stood transfixed for several minutes in front of this biographical vista, soaking in the perspectives and the details. Seeing so much of my life, all at once, was profoundly moving.

E-memories will not be trapped back in cabinets and shoe boxes. They will be on our end tables and walls. They will follow us on our travels. They will keep us company, showing us friendly faces, letting us hear cherished voices. E-memory will be an intimate extension of bio-memory. And change it into something new.

RECALLING WHAT MATTERS

I don’t know about you, but sometimes I’m absentminded. I forget where I put things. Sometimes, coming out of the airport terminal, I have a momentary flash of panic. Where did I park the car? Was it level one or two? I hate getting home from the grocery store, looking up at that burned-out lightbulb, and realizing that I forgot—again!—to buy a replacement.

Once I left my notebook computer containing most of my e-memory on the security table at San Francisco International Airport. I dashed back, my heart racing dangerously, wondering if someone had walked off with a digital copy of my life. Thankfully, it was still there. Then I forgot the computer again at the Dulles Airport security, and didn’t realize my mistake until I had boarded the plane and it was too late to go back. I managed to have it over nighted to me for $150, and all I could think was that I would gladly have paid many times that amount to ensure no one else had my data. More than a half million of my fellow Americans also left their computers at checkpoints in 2008.

A busy person may be plagued by absentmindedness, simply because he has a lot on his mind. You forgot to bring home the milk, because by the time you got to the grocery store you were thinking about the items needed for your pets. You forgot your lunch meeting, because you had just gotten off the phone with a colleague and were engrossed with new ideas for your next project.

Reminders must be made at the appropriate time; it is no good having a shopping list that is back at your office while you are in the grocery store. A reminder to make a phone call while you are wasting time in rush-hour traffic would be priceless. Likewise, you must be able to create reminders anytime, anyplace, or they may be lost. If you think of something that needs doing while driving, it will not suffice to have to wait a half hour to get home and write it down. Probably by then you will have thought of three other things that need doing and forgotten at least one.

This is why e-memory will be in the cloud, accessible anywhere, anytime. We want to be able to type or speak notes and to-do items whenever they occur to us. The to-do items will be associated with a time, place, or mode of activity. For example, the task “Buy milk ” is associated with the grocery store (a place). The task “E-mail Catherine” is associated with using your computer (an activity). The task “Pick up Suzy at 4:00” is associated with a time. If you are struck by the thought that a cell phone is capable of knowing time and place, and can input text, voice, and pictures, then you realize how close we are to the reality of this vision. All we need is a little more software that can understand such things as milk being available at grocery stores.

In addition to giving you all the right reminders, it will not be too long before your e-memories will fill in your other absentminded gaps. Your increasingly location-aware cell phone will remind you where you parked your car. You will track where you have left things like your glasses, either by noting where your devices last detected their RFID tag, or by taking pictures of them. When your mind is absent, your e-memory will always be there.

Having too much on my mind doesn’t just make me absentminded; it can make me feel mentally cluttered, impeding my productivity. David Allen’s popular book and seminar series
Getting Things Done
stands on the central premise that we are hindered by mental clutter:

First of all, if it’s on your mind, your mind isn’t clear. Anything you consider unfinished in any way must be captured in a trusted system outside your mind. . . .

Unlike your bio-memory, your e-memory will never be overwhelmed. Total Recall software can make sure you are protected from clutter. For instance, if I were to show you all my 150,000 recorded Web pages, you would see that nearly half are duplicates, or are near duplicates that differ by just a tiny amount from some other page. A natural reaction would be to delete all the near duplicates to eliminate clutter. However, e-memory never needs to suffer from clutter; only a poor recall interface looks cluttered. Good recall software could simply group all the near duplicates together and show a single representative in response to your queries. Suppose I have repeatedly gone to the same Web page and the only thing that changed on it was the advertisements. Most of the time, I just want to see one page, hiding away the clutter of all the extra copies with inconsequential differences. But on that one day that I want to recall an ad for 50 percent off a new GPS, suddenly the differences are very consequential—and I’ve still got them.

Total Recall software will hide away all the clutter as if it had been discarded, but whenever you actually want it, it will be at your fingertips. You will have all the advantages of complete retention, with none of the downside of clutter.

And e-memories are not depressed by dealing mostly in the mundane. One thing you’ll notice when perusing a lifelog is the sheer banality of 99 percent of life. Television producers periodically demonstrate this when they have a camera crew live with a family for a long time or Reality TV records a group surviving on an island twenty-four/seven. You will very quickly come to appreciate just how mind-numbingly dull, trite, predictable, tedious, and prosaic most of our life moments really are. Life as it appears in objective playback is tedium to the dullth power. But that’s not a problem for an e-memory. You know that you’ll never want or need to look back at virtually all of it ever again. You’ll also know that nothing important will be missed—just as Cathal Gurrin has that special moment of first meeting his girlfriend.

The team that Cathal works with at Dublin City University has attacked the banality of lifelogging by creating software that looks for novelty. It works something like this: Suppose your GPS says you were at the same place as usual this morning for breakfast, and the images look very similar to those taken most other mornings. Then it was probably the mundane, same old breakfast at home as usual. On the other hand, if you were at an unusual place for breakfast, or more faces were around the table than usual, that is more interesting. Cathal and his colleagues take thousands of SenseCam images, and boil them down to a presentation that highlights the unusual. The mundane is still there, but tucked away so that it doesn’t clutter up what is interesting.