Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is Changing Our Minds for the Better. Clive Thompson
I’ve rarely met anyone who seems so scatterbrained in everyday life. He’ll start talking about one subject, veer off to another in midsentence, only to interrupt that sentence with another digression. If he were a teenager, he’d probably be medicated for ADD.
Yet his lifelog does indeed let him perform remarkable memory feats. When a friend has a birthday, he’ll root around in old handwritten letters to find anecdotes for a toast. For a commencement address, he dimly recalled a terrific aphorism that he’d pinned to a card above his desk three decades before, and found it: “Start many fires.” Given that he’s old, his health records have become quite useful: He’s used SenseCam pictures of his post-heart-attack chest rashes to figure out whether he was healing or not, by quickly riffling through them like a flip-book. “Doctors are always asking you stuff like ‘When did this pain begin?’ or ‘What were you eating on such and such a day?’—and that’s precisely the stuff we’re terrible at remembering,” he notes. While working on a Department of Energy task force a few years ago, he settled an argument by checking the audio record of a conference call. When he tried to describe another jazz performance, he found himself tongue-tied, so he just punched up the audio and played it.
Being around Bell is like hanging out with some sort of mnemonic performing seal. I wound up barking weird trivia questions just to see if he could answer them. When was the first-ever e-mail you sent your son? 1996. Where did you go to church when you were a kid? Here’s a First Methodist Sunday School certificate. Did you leave a tip when you bought a coffee this morning on the way to work? Yep—here’s the pictures from Peet’s Coffee.
But Bell believes the deepest effects of his experiment aren’t just about being able to recall details of his life. I’d expected him to be tied to his computer umbilically, pinging it to call up bits of info all the time. In reality, he tends to consult it sparingly—mostly when I prompt him for details he can’t readily bring to mind.
The long-term effect has been more profound than any individual act of recall. The lifelog, he argues, given him greater mental peace. Knowing there’s a permanent backup of almost everything he reads, sees, or hears allows him to live more in the moment, paying closer attention to what he’s doing. The anxiety of committing something to memory is gone.
“It’s a freeing feeling,” he says. “The fact that I can offload my memory, knowing that it’s there—that whatever I’ve seen can be found again. I feel cleaner, lighter.”
The problem is that while Bell’s offboard memory may be immaculate and detailed, it can be curiously hard to search. Your organic brain may contain mistaken memories, but generally it finds things instantaneously and fluidly, and it’s superb at flitting from association to association. If we had met at a party last month and you’re now struggling to remember my name, you’ll often sift sideways through various cues—who else was there? what were we talking about? what music was playing?—until one of them clicks, and ping: The name comes to us. (Clive Thompson!) In contrast, digital tools don’t have our brain’s problem with inaccuracy; if you give it “Clive,” it’ll quickly pull up everything with a “Clive” associated, in perfect fidelity. But machine searching is brittle. If you don’t have the right cue to start with—say, the name “Clive”—or if the data didn’t get saved in the right way, you might never find your way back to my name.
Bell struggles with these machine limits all the time. While eating lunch in San Francisco, he tells me about a Paul Krugman column he liked, so I ask him to show it to me. But he can’t find it on the desktop copy of his lifelog: His search for “Paul Krugman” produces scores of columns, and Bell can’t quite filter out the right one. When I ask him to locate a colleague’s phone number, he runs into another wall: he can locate all sorts of things—even audio of their last conversation—but no number. “Where the hell is this friggin’ phone call?” he mutters, pecking at the keyboard. “I either get nothing or I get too much!” It’s like a scene from a Philip K. Dick novel: A man has external memory, but it’s locked up tight and he can’t access it—a cyborg estranged from his own mind.
As I talked to other lifeloggers, they bemoaned the same problem. Saving is easy; finding can be hard. Google and other search engines have spent decades figuring out how to help people find things on the Web, of course. But a Web search is actually easier than searching through someone’s private digital memories. That’s because the Web is filled with social markers that help Google try to guess what’s going to be useful. Google’s famous PageRank system looks at social rankings:15 If a Web page has been linked to by hundreds of other sites, Google guesses that that page is important in some way. But lifelogs don’t have that sort of social data; unlike blogs or online social networks, they’re a private record used only by you.
Without a way to find or make sense of the material, a lifelog’s greatest strength—its byzantine, brain-busting level of detail—becomes, paradoxically, its greatest flaw. Sure, go ahead and archive your every waking moment, but how do you parse it? Review it? Inspect it? Nobody has another life in which to relive their previous one. The lifelogs remind me of Jorge Luis Borges’s story “On Exactitude in Science,”16 in which a group of cartographers decide to draw a map of their empire with a 1:1 ratio: it is the exact size of the actual empire, with the exact same detail. The next generation realizes that a map like that is useless, so they let it decay. Even if we are moving toward a world where less is forgotten, that isn’t the same as more being remembered.
Cathal Gurrin probably has the most heavily photographed life in history, even more than Bell. Gurrin, a researcher at Dublin City University, began wearing a SenseCam five years ago and has ten million pictures. The SenseCam has preserved candid moments he’d never otherwise have bothered to shoot: the time he lounged with friends in his empty house the day before he moved; his first visit to China, where the SenseCam inadvertently captured the last-ever pictures of historic buildings before they were demolished in China’s relentless urban construction upheaval. He’s dipped into his log to try to squirm out of a speeding ticket (only to have his SenseCam prove the police officer was right; another self-serving memory distortion on the part of his organic memory).
But Gurrin, too, has found that it can be surprisingly hard to locate a specific image. In a study at his lab, he listed fifty of his “most memorable” moments from the last two and a half years, like his first encounters with new friends, last encounters with loved ones, and meeting TV celebrities. Then, over the next year and a half, his labmates tested him to see how quickly he could find a picture of one of those moments. The experiment was gruesome: The first searches took over thirteen minutes. As the lab slowly improved the image-search tools, his time dropped to about two minutes, “which is still pretty slow,” as one of his labmates noted. This isn’t a problem just for lifeloggers; even middle-of-the-road camera phone users quickly amass so many photos that they often give up on organizing them. Steve Whittaker, a psychologist who designs interfaces and studies how we interact with computers, asked a group of subjects to find a personally significant picture on their own hard drive. Many couldn’t. “And they’d get pretty upset when they realized that stuff was there, but essentially gone,” Whittaker tells me. “We’d have to reassure them that ‘no, no, everyone has this problem!’” Even Gurrin admits to me that he rarely searches for anything at all in his massive archive. He’s waiting for better search tools to emerge.
Mind you, he’s confident they will. As he points out, fifteen years ago you couldn’t find much on the Web because the search engines were dreadful. “And the first MP3 players were horrendous for finding songs,” he adds. The most promising trends in search algorithms include everything from “sentiment analysis” (you could hunt for a memory based on how happy or sad it is) to sophisticated ways of analyzing pictures, many of which are already emerging in everyday life: detecting faces and locations or snippets of text in pictures, allowing you to hunt down hard-to-track images by starting with a vague piece of half recall, the way we interrogate our own minds. The app Evernote has already become popular because of its ability to search for text, even bent or sideways, within photos and documents.
Yet the weird truth is that searching a lifelog may not, in the end, be the way we take advantage