Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is Changing Our Minds for the Better. Clive Thompson
correctly. Memory isn’t passive; it’s active.10 It’s not like pulling a sheet from a filing cabinet and retrieving a precise copy of the event. You’re also regenerating the memory on the fly. You pull up the accurate gist, but you’re missing a lot of details. So you imaginatively fill in the missing details with stuff that seems plausible, whether or not it’s actually what happened. There’s a reason why we call it “re-membering”; we reassemble the past like Frankenstein assembling a body out of parts. That’s why Deb Roy was so stunned to look into his TotalRecall system and realize that he’d mentally mangled the details of his son’s first steps. In reality, Roy’s mother was in the kitchen and the sun was down—but Roy remembered it as his wife being in the kitchen on a sunny morning. As a piece of narrative, it’s perfectly understandable. The memory feels much more magical that way: The sun shining! The boy’s mother nearby! Our minds are drawn to what feels true, not what’s necessarily so. And worse, these filled-in errors may actually compound over time. Some memory scientists suspect that when we misrecall something, we can store the false details in our memory in what’s known as reconsolidation.11 So the next time we remember it, we’re pulling up false details; maybe we’re even adding new errors with each act of recall. Episodic memory becomes a game of telephone played with oneself.
The malleability of memory helps explain why, over decades, we can adopt a surprisingly rewritten account of our lives. In 1962, the psychologist Daniel Offer asked a group12 of fourteen-year-old boys questions about significant aspects of their lives. When he hunted them down thirty-four years later and asked them to think back on their teenage years and answer precisely the same questions, their answers were remarkably different. As teenagers, 70 percent said religion was helpful to them; in their forties, only 26 percent recalled that. Fully 82 percent of the teenagers said their parents used corporal punishment, but three decades later, only one third recalled their parents hitting them. Over time, the men had slowly revised their memories, changing them to suit the ongoing shifts in their personalities, or what’s called hindsight bias. If you become less religious as an adult, you might start thinking that’s how you were as a child, too.
For eons, people have fought back against the fabrications of memory by using external aids. We’ve used chronological diaries for at least two millennia, and every new technological medium increases the number of things we capture: George Eastman’s inexpensive Brownie camera gave birth to everyday photography, and VHS tape did the same thing for personal videos in the 1980s. In the last decade, though, the sheer welter of artificial memory devices has exploded, so there are more tools capturing shards of our lives than ever before—e-mail, text messages, camera phone photos and videos, note-taking apps and word processing, GPS traces, comments, and innumerable status updates. (And those are just the voluntary recordings you participate in. There are now innumerable government and corporate surveillance cameras recording you, too.)
The biggest shift is that most of this doesn’t require much work. Saving artificial memories used to require foresight and effort, which is why only a small fraction of very committed people kept good diaries. But digital memory is frequently passive. You don’t intend to keep all your text messages, but if you’ve got a smartphone, odds are they’re all there, backed up every time you dock your phone. Dashboard cams on Russian cars are supposed to help drivers prove their innocence in car accidents, but because they’re always on, they also wound up recording a massive meteorite entering the atmosphere. Meanwhile, today’s free e-mail services like Gmail are biased toward permanent storage; they offer such capacious memory that it’s easier for the user to keep everything than to engage in the mental effort of deciding whether to delete each individual message. (This is an intentional design decision on Google’s part, of course; the more they can convince us to retain e-mail, the more data about our behavior they have in order to target ads at us more effectively.) And when people buy new computers, they rarely delete old files—in fact, research shows that most of us just copy our old hard drives13 onto our new computers, and do so again three years later with our next computers, and on and on, our digital external memories nested inside one other like wooden dolls. The cost of storage has plummeted so dramatically that it’s almost comical to consider: In 1981, a gigabyte of memory cost roughly three hundred thousand dollars, but now it can be had for pennies.
We face an intriguing inversion point in human memory. We’re moving from a period in which most of the details of our lives were forgotten to one in which many, perhaps most of them, will be captured. How will that change the way we live—and the way we understand the shape of our lives?
There’s a small community of people who’ve been trying to figure this out by recording as many bits of their lives as they can as often as possible. They don’t want to lose a detail; they’re trying to create perfect recall, to find out what it’s like. They’re the lifeloggers.
When I interview someone, I take pretty obsessive notes: not only everything they say, but also what they look like, how they talk. Within a few minutes of meeting Gordon Bell, I realized I’d met my match: His digital records of me were thousands of times more complete than my notes about him.
Bell is probably the world’s most ambitious and committed lifelogger.14 A tall and genial white-haired seventy-eight-year-old, he walks around outfitted with a small fish-eye camera hanging around his neck, snapping pictures every sixty seconds, and a tiny audio recorder that captures most conversations. Software on his computer saves a copy of every Web page he looks at and every e-mail he sends or receives, even a recording of every phone call.
“Which is probably illegal, but what the hell,” he says with a guffaw. “I never know what I’m going to need later on, so I keep everything.” When I visited him at his cramped office in San Francisco, it wasn’t the first time we’d met; we’d been hanging out and talking for a few days. He typed “Clive Thompson” into his desktop computer to give me a taste of what his “surrogate brain,” as he calls it, had captured of me. (He keeps a copy of his lifelog on his desktop and his laptop.) The screen fills with a flood of Clive-related material: twenty-odd e-mails Bell and I had traded, copies of my articles he’d perused online, and pictures beginning with our very first meeting, a candid shot of me with my hand outstretched. He clicks on an audio file from a conversation we’d had the day before, and the office fills with the sound of the two of us talking about a jazz concert he’d seen in Australia with his wife. It’s eerie hearing your own voice preserved in somebody else’s memory base. Then I realize in shock that when he’d first told me that story, I’d taken down incorrect notes about it. I’d written that he was with his daughter, not his wife. Bell’s artificial memory was correcting my memory.
Bell did not intend to be a pioneer in recording his life. Indeed, he stumbled into it. It started with a simple desire: He wanted to get rid of stacks of paper. Bell has a storied history; in his twenties, he designed computers, back when they were the size of refrigerators, with spinning hard disks the size of tires. He quickly became wealthy, quit his job to become a serial investor, and then in the 1990s was hired by Microsoft as an éminence grise, tasked with doing something vaguely futuristic—whatever he wanted, really. By that time, Bell was old enough to have amassed four filing cabinets crammed with personal archives, ranging from programming memos to handwritten letters from his kid and weird paraphernalia like a “robot driver’s license.” He was sick of lugging it around, so in 1997 he bought a scanner to see if he could go paperless. Pretty soon he’d turned a lifetime of paper into searchable PDFs and was finding it incredibly useful. So he started thinking: Why not have a copy of everything he did? Microsoft engineers helped outfit his computer with autorecording software. A British engineer showed him the SenseCam she’d invented. He began wearing that, too. (Except for the days where he’s worried it’ll stop his heart. “I’ve been a little leery of wearing it for the last week or so because the pacemaker company sent a little note around,” he tells me. He had a massive heart attack a few years back and had a pacemaker implanted. “Pacemakers don’t like magnets, and the SenseCam has one.” One part of his cyborg body isn’t compatible with the other.)
The truth is, Bell looks a little nuts walking around with his recording gear strapped on. He knows this; he doesn’t mind. Indeed, Bell possesses the dry air of a wealthy older man