Total Recall - C. Gordon Bell [28]
My friend Sunil Vemuri is the CTO of reQall, a really fascinating memory-aid product. I use reQall to create reminders and notes for myself. I call up their phone number and say, “Add.” There’s a beep and then I make some comment, perhaps, “Book the flights for my vacation.” I can retrieve this reminder by calling in later and saying, “Recall,” instead of “Add.” I also get an e-mail, with a recording of what I said, and even a transcription of what I said. Besides using the phone and e-mail, I can use other interfaces like a Web browser and instant messenger. Being able to create and retrieve memos in all these ways is very powerful. I even use the phone to create dear-diary entries: I can be driving along, place a call on my cell phone, and tell a little story that ends up transcribed in my e-mail and also with my own voice recorded.
All that was exciting enough to get me to join reQall’s board, but Sunil expanded my vision of what is possible when he visited Jim Gemmell a little while ago. They sat down in Gemmell’s office and were chatting about all kinds of Total Recall ideas (when Sunil was still a graduate student at MIT he got involved in the CARPE research community, so he’s been a coconspirator with us for years). In the course of the conversation, Sunil made reference to Gemmell’s family, and even what school Gemmell’s oldest son attends. Gemmell had only mentioned this once, and that was more than a year ago, so he was astonished at Sunil’s memory. But Sunil gave up his secret later.
“Do you know how I remembered about your family and your son’s school?” he asked.
Gemmell shook his head and Sunil went on. “After our last meeting, I called reQall and spoke some notes about our meeting, including those facts about your family. Now, I also have reQall programmed to play random facts to me every so often. Since our last meeting, I’ve heard those facts about your family a couple of times, so now I remember them.”
This kind of memory refresh is the driving factor behind another product called SuperMemo. Instead of just randomly remind ing you, SuperMemo considers the typical pattern of memory loss. Cognitive scientists have measured how memories typically fade, and can plot the odds of your forgetting something after first hearing it, after one reminder, after two reminders, and so on. Supermemo intervenes when the odds of your losing the memory reach a certain level, say 15 percent. For instance, two days after hearing something, you might be projected to have a 15 percent chance of forgetting the fact, so you are reminded. Eight days later, you again are projected to have more than 15 percent odds of forgetting, so you are reminded again, and so on, with the time between reminders growing longer and longer.
RETAINING PAINFUL MEMORIES
When I give talks about MyLifeBits, someone in the audience usually says something like, “But isn’t forgetting a good thing sometimes? Isn’t the idea of recording our lives in excruciating detail actually a rather bad idea? Don’t we need to forget?”
Everyone has experienced embarrassing moments he’d rather forget. You’re the quarterback who ran the wrong way down the football field. You called your lover by the name of an ex-flame. One of my most embarrassing memories was shown on the Business Channel in 1983. I was one of a dozen company founders sitting at a table, explaining to the press our plan of merging with another company to turn our fortunes around. There was only one hitch with this ill-fated plan: We had nothing to sell. I have nothing but scorn for product announcements without an actual product, and here I was in the thick of it. Every time I think of it I feel an echo of the original horror I felt clamoring around in my gut—which is why I try not to think about it very much.
But you can easily avoid replaying such memories. And who knows? Maybe someday when you’re old and gray and retired and you look back across your life with the expanded perspective that often comes in the winter of life, you