Do you wish you
had a better memory? That you could always recall people’s names?
Well, be careful what you wish for. As I found out, when making
Remember, Remember, modern technology may be changing our
memories forever, and the effects may be more than we’ve bargained
for.
In ancient Rome a
lucky senator might have someone called the Nomenclator to whisper
the names of people he met. Now Wendy Hall, at Southampton
University thinks we’ll soon have a modern equivalent, in the form
of glasses or a kind of hearing aid, to give us all those useful
facts we’ve forgotten. Her colleague, computer scientist Nigel
Shadbolt, thinks we’re at a critical turning point. We’re already
outsourcing our memories to our mobile phones and SatNavs. Just
imagine having plug-in memory stores for everything you can’t be
bothered to learn!
But what about
remembering your own life? I must admit I’ve always been a bit
obsessed with memory. It’s not just that, as a psychologist, I want
to know how memory works in the brain – I love to store my own
memories. I began writing a diary in 1964 and have hardly missed a
day since. My mother began hers in 1939 and my daughter keeps one
too. I don’t really understand why, but it makes me a feel a little
safer, or more confident, to know I can look up what happened.
Working on this
programme I got them down from their dusty shelves. I laughed at the
little sketches of ponies when I was twelve, and the pages decorated
with tiny beetles – their significance only obvious when I read “I
love Paul” or “bought four more packs of Beatle cards after school”.
Moving on a few years are lists of exams, pining over boyfriends,
and pages and pages of bringing up the kids, conferences and – yes –
all my latest theories about how the mind works. But it’s a mere
page of inadequate scribbles each day.
Would I like more?
Much more? Would anyone want a complete record of their lives? As I
found out, “lifeloggers” do. Some wear a device called a SenseCam,
that hangs round their neck and takes a photo every thirty seconds.
At the end of the day they review the pictures in fast mode. Until I
tried it I thought this was a ridiculous gimmick, yet the effect is
very strange. You soon forget you are wearing it, then when you
review the pictures later on you remember little oddities that
weren’t even recorded, like what you were thinking about as that
cyclist went by. What a strange thought – that you might have ideas
that you would normally forget but by reviewing your SenseCam you
can get them back.
Emma Berry, at
Addenbrookes’ Hospital in Cambridge, is hoping the SenseCam can help
people with Alzheimer’s and severe memory loss. Although only a few
patients have tried it, the effects are already dramatic. Reviewing
their days over and over seems to help them remember significant
events, enjoy conversations more, and even recall things that are
not on the photos.
Meanwhile, Deb
Roy, a computer engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, is studying language learning by recording both video
and audio of every moment of his young children’s lives. He told me
of the odd effects on his family of being able to go back and check
exactly what did happen – it’s not always what he thought he
remembered. And Gordon Bell, one of the legendary figures of
computer science, is trying to capture every aspect of his own life.
In his “MyLifeBits” project everything is digitised – work,
correspondence, e-mail, music, photos, and everything that can be
scanned. He claims “one’s life can reside on a hard drive”; it’s
“potential immortality”.
I pick up my Mum’s
diary for 1946. They are about to move from their Nissen hut with
the broken window, the RAF transport is late. She has permission to
go to a village dance. I can smell the old ink, feel the rough
pages, and smile at the sheet of old-fashioned blotting paper in the
front. This couldn’t be digitally captured could it? What would
potential immortality mean?
To my surprise,
the man who knows best is Peter Gabriel, musician and founder of the
band Genesis. Over lunch at his home in Wiltshire he told me his
plans to create a social networking site for the dead. For the dead?
Of course it’s really for the living, to preserve of themselves
whatever they think worthwhile, but there’s more, he laughs, “you
may want to send out birthday messages beyond the grave”. I realised
this is far, far more than a fancy diary or huge photo collection.
After I’m dead, a machine could send out messages that would be
quite convincing to my friends.
If I am my
memories who will I be in this strange new world?
