Total Recall - C. Gordon Bell [23]
My biological memory had reduced my relationship with Ivan down to the humdrum, but my e-memory stepped in to restore the significance of our history, making it possible for me to compose a fitting toast for his birthday.
We all want better recall. The market for memory enhancement books, elixirs, computer programs, devices, and games is gigantic.
As people get older, they start to get paranoid about small memory lapses. When a forty-year-old misplaces his car keys, he feels annoyed. When a sixty-five-year-old loses the keys, he starts Googling about Alzheimer’s disease. In his search he might read about another condition known as mild cognitive impairment, which afflicts as much as 5 percent of the population past the age of seventy. It’s very real, and very scary.
The fear of oblivion before death is big enough to drive a $4.2 billion industry in medicinal herbs and supplements for memory enhancement. Health-food emporium shelves are stocked with herbs, micronutrients, antioxidants, tonics, supplements, and potions to boost your brainpower. Labels on bottles of coenzyme Q10, ginseng, ginkgo biloba, rosemary, and salvia promise to keep your mind nimble.
In 2007, the U.S. market for brain-fitness programs and “neuro-software” was $225 million. Nintendo sells a product called Brain Age that claims it can help you “[get] the most out of your prefrontal cortex!” The software program MindFit combines cognitive assessment of more than a dozen different skills with a personalized training regimen based on that assessment. Dr. Michael Merzenich, a neuroscientist at the University of California in San Francisco, developed a set of computer tools called the Brain Fitness Program intended to increase processing speeds in aging brains. And for about ten dollars a month, you can subscribe to Web sites like Lumosity.com and Happy-Neuron.com to tap into a variety of cognitive training exercises.
You can also buy books on how to exercise your brain with games, puzzles, and memory tricks. You can learn about the biology and behavior of memory from books such as In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind by Nobel Laureate Eric Kandel and The Seven Sins of Memory: How the Mind Forgets and Remembers by Harvard University psychologist Daniel Schacter.
For all I know, ginkgo biloba and the Brain Fitness Program will indeed improve your bio-memory. But the world of Total Recall promises something broader: a revolution.
THE INESCAPABLE FRAILTY OF BIO-MEMORY
The memories in our brains are stored as patterns of connections between neurons, or nerve cells. Computers store information in a series of microscopic switches turned on or off. Brains and computers both store information, manipulate it, and use it to decide between courses of action. For these reasons we say that both systems have “memory,” but this similarity only holds up in the first approximation. Scratch the surface and you find vast differences between biological and digital memory.
To the owner of a human brain, memory feels like a single resource. It turns out this feeling is an illusion. Scientists who study biological memory describe three distinct systems:
• Procedural memory, sometimes known as muscle memory, is for physical skills such as riding a bike, ballet dancing, typing.
• Semantic memory encodes meanings, definitions, and concepts—facts that you know that aren’t rooted in time or place, such as “A cat has four legs” or “The capital of Japan is Tokyo.”
• Episodic memory, sometimes known