A Head For Detail

By: Clive ThompsonWed Dec 19, 2007 at 8:14 AM

Gordon Bell feeds every piece of his life into a surrogate brain, and soon the rest of us will be able to do the same. But does perfect memory make you smarter, or just drive you nuts?

Enlarge

A few of the things on Gordon Bell's mind: From ancestral photos to his MIT diploma to his robot driver's license, it's all in there. And we do mean all.

Total Recall

If it's not in your database, it doesn't exist. That's the sort of eerie philosophical proposition Bell's project raises. He has a superhuman brain: Does that change the nature of being human?

For Bell, MyLifeBits has reduced the nagging anxiety we face every day at work. We meet an important stranger and panic about whether we'll remember her name and position. We browse through Web pages, wondering absently if we should take the extra few seconds to bookmark something for future reference. These tiny but draining bits of mental toil have fallen from Bell's cognitive load--a luxury even for me as I reported this piece: Copies of his old memos from DEC? The list of people he considered hiring a few years ago to head up Microsoft Research, with handwritten notes on their strengths and weaknesses? He had pristine copies at hand.

Martin Conway, a psychologist and memory expert at the University of Leeds, argues that projects like MyLifeBits can actually improve mental health by freeing our brains to be more productive and more creative. "We're moving into an age when technology is going to massively enhance our cognitive abilities, our problem- solving abilities," he says. It's rather like the way Google has already become an indispensable part of how people think about things--sitting at their desks, constantly tapping into the world's massive trove of information. "Your real memory becomes a sort of executive manager for all these other technological abilities."

"Forgetting is how we make sense of life," says one skeptic. "We need to forget."

Personal-productivity guru David Allen also has long argued that the frailty of everyday memory is the primary source of stress for overburdened corporate types. We sit around anxious about our to-do lists because we can never entirely remember them (while we're at work) or entirely forget them (when we're not).

Yet Bell's project has also made some observers nervous. It may not be a good idea, they argue, to tamper with human memory--because it's such a powerful part of what makes us who we are.

"I'm a big fan of forgetting," says Frank Nack, a German computer scientist who published a critique of lifelogging experiments last winter. "It's how we make sense of life, how we interpret things. Everybody is building a life story; we all need to forget certain stages. I don't want to be reminded of everything I said." Forgetting, he points out, is key to cultural concepts like forgiveness and nostalgia. Sure, we lose track of most of what happens to us--but that natural filtering process results in what we call knowledge and wisdom. When memories are only a click away, Nack says, they're cheapened. Without the difficult act of pulling something from the crannies of the mind, we become like the hapless high-school student who gets 2 million hits for a search on "World War II" and has no way of prioritizing them.

James L. McGaugh, a memory expert at the University of California, Irvine, points to the sad spectacle of Funes, a character in a Jorge Luis Borges story who suffers a head injury that renders him incapable of forgetting. "He says, 'My mind is like a garbage heap.' That's what it'd be like," McGaugh adds. "You have to watch what you wish for with memory."

As Bell's significant other realized, if everyone had a record of every conversation, it could turn everyday life and work into a maddening series of gotchas. Imagine that prig in your weekly meeting confronting you with an ill-advised comment you made three months ago. (On the other hand, imagine having a handy record of your boss's promises about when, precisely, he'd get that report back to you.) College graduates are already getting a taste of life in a world of persistent memory. Last spring, many found themselves getting turned down for entry-level jobs after prospective employers Googled them and unearthed tales of debauchery--with photos!--on their MySpace pages. Some corporations already erase all email older than a few months for fear of suffering the fate of Enron or Microsoft, companies that had humiliating years-old correspondence subpoenaed.

What's more, knowing that everything is being logged might actually turn us into different people. We might be less flamboyant, less funny, less willing to say risky but potentially useful things, much as politicians on-camera tamp down their public statements into stifled happytalk. "There'd be a chilling effect," particularly early on, says Mark Federman, former strategist for the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology, a high-tech think tank. "We'd all be on our best behavior. Reality would become reality TV."