MEMORY AND FORGETTING IN THE DIGITAL AGE
By Yadin Dudai
New Scientist
October 24, 2009
Original Link
Just as Molière's bourgeois gentleman spoke in prose without being aware of it, most of those who fear forgetting do not realise that they have amnesiphobia. But perhaps this tiny lexical blind spot is not important any more. Amnesiphobics, unite and rejoice: Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmell (and Bill Gates, in his enthusiastic introduction) now inform us that we need never fear forgetting again. Total recall is around the corner. But alas, in such a world, even our phobia of forgetting cannot be forgotten.
Even if we wished to forget, Bell and Gemmell say, we couldn't, as somewhere in the cyberspace cloud engulfing us the engram of our old fears will live for eternity - or at least until the software is updated to a version that can't read the original files.
Total Recall is an extended corporate US manifesto, whose explicit slogan is: "I hate to lose my memories. I want total recall." The subtext is a bit more naive: I want total control over my life, I want immortality. If only I could record and store everything, I would become Homo eternicus. This is the same philosophy that feeds the US's mammoth pharmaceutical, food and health industries.
The scheme seems ingeniously simple and technically feasible. To overcome oblivion, say the authors, all you need are sensitive miniature sensors and several terabytes of storage, which are already or soon-to-be affordable. You can then record every minute of your life using video, audio, location and physiological signals, culminating in the commitment of this endless stream of information to your personal MyLifeBits account in your pocket and/or in cyberspace. Proper software will permit you to retrieve the information years later, and it will even pass by default to your progeny for eternity, with the hope that they will pay attention to it.
The information technology capabilities depicted in Total Recall are fascinating, yet not really revolutionary any more. We owe this luxury of habituation to the wonders of the electronic universe and to pioneers and visionary entrepreneurs like Bell and Gemmell (and Gates). But in their self-confident manifesto, these cyberspace explorers overlook some attributes of the cognitive universe.
For example, as cognitive psychology and neuroscience demonstrate again and again, two individuals sensing the same input, or the same individual sensing the same input at different times, may understand very different things. So registering bits of episodes is unlikely to really preserve these episodes.
Furthermore, when we perceive the world, we get not only objective input but also the context, including our complex internal physiological milieu and all of our emotional baggage. Again, it is unlikely that a computerised total recall system will be able to register this unique endogenous world and the way it interacts with the outside world to generate the subjective percept.
Most importantly, though, the authors, consumed by their hunt for every last bit of information (and even offering practical advice on how to make an extra buck in the process), forget forgetting.
For the human condition, forgetting is at least as important as remembering -- sometimes more so. Without it, we are all bound to lead the miserable life of A. R. Luria's patient Solomon Shereshevsky, who was crippled by his boundless, indelible memory, or his fictional counterpart, Jorge Luis Borges's Funes. No forgetting implies no generalisation, no real present time, no amelioration of trauma, and no weaving of meaningful life narratives. For the human condition, forgetting is at least as important as remembering
Total recall may be beneficial for businesses and courts, clinics and insurance agencies, even possibly in settling occasional disputes with significant others, but rarely would it be deeply rewarding for the humble self.
As its title suggests, Delete is about forgetting, more specifically about the demise of forgetting and the resulting perils. Viktor Mayer-Schönberger is worried by the same things that excite Bell and Gemmell.
He observes how advanced information technology can allow the traces of every experience to chase us forever. Yet evolution has created the brain in such a way that the traces of experience do fade over time, receding into oblivion. Presumably, this offers us some kind of survival advantage - as Shereshevsky and Funes would attest. Mayer-Schönberger presents a scholarly discussion throughout, unlike the PowerPoint style of some chapters in Total Recall.
And he comes up with an interesting solution: expiration dates in electronic files. This would stop the files from existing forever and flooding us and the next generations with gigantic piles of mostly useless or even potentially harmful details.
This proposal should not be forgotten as we navigate between the urge to record and immortalise our lives and the need to stay productive and sane.
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Yadin Dudai investigates memory, and chairs the Department of Neurobiology at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel.