Total Recall - C. Gordon Bell [25]
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