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By Root 1046 0

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.

Total Recall software will get better and better at spotting the interesting moments for you as we acquire more data such as your pulse, the pitch and volume of your voice, or even the brain waves you are emitting. Researchers at the University of Tokyo have already demonstrated a baseball cap that records both video and alpha waves from your brain. Based on the alpha waves, they can do a pretty good job of guessing what segments of the video were interesting.

For an e-memory, there’s no drawback to capturing the long stretches of banality that comprise most of life, there are only potential benefits. Go ahead and fill it with et ceteras, so ons, and ad nauseams. The more you record, the better.

Your mind can be freed from mundane memorization. Let your e-memory remember each detail, and show you the average, the maximum, the chart, the patterns, or the unusual. Then when you decide that one particular area bears further investigation, you can recall all the gory details—perhaps the actual data points, or some additional photos. Knowing that your e-memory has the task of perfectly remembering allows you to concentrate on more interesting things.

E-memories not only relieve you of memorizing what you don’t care much