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?

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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.

Alan Smeaton, a professor of computing at Dublin University, thinks it can. After hearing about Bell's project, Smeaton got Microsoft to lend him a few SenseCams and gave them to his students, who began wearing them all day long. They discovered an intriguing psychological effect: If, at the end of each workday, they spent a minute scrolling through the thousands of pictures the SenseCam had taken--a high-speed replay of their day--it had the effect of stimulating their short-term memory.

"You actually remember things you'd already forgotten," Smeaton says. "You'd see somebody you met in a corridor and had a two-minute conversation with that you'd completely forgotten about. And you'd go, 'Oh, I forgot to send an email to that guy!' It's bizarre. It improves your recall by 100%."

In fact, "refresher" imagery is so powerful that it seems to help restore recall in people who have very little memory, or none at all. Ken Wood, a computer scientist in Microsoft's research lab in Cambridge, gave a SenseCam to a UK woman who had lost her short-term memory due to encephalitis. She began wearing it to events she wanted to retain. After each of them, she reviewed the pictures several times over the course of the following two weeks. When the researchers quizzed her a month later, she still had "significant recall."

"She was over the moon," Wood marvels. "Totally thrilled."

Silicon Cortex

Consider for a second how, precisely, we think. We use our memories all the time, of course, often by "active" remembering--scrolling through our minds to locate a tidbit. But much mental labor is passive. We think about something in the background, subconsciously letting a problem brew. Then we suddenly hit upon an interesting combination of things, a new way of thinking about a problem: the elusive, all-important epiphany.

What if our computers had their own intelligence, and could do that background work for us? What if they could mine our memories for new ways of thinking? And what if they could prioritize the vast heaps of material in the backs of our minds, shaping the informational chaos that often leaves Bell so baffled? A memory system that could think on its own would unlock the lifelog's full potential.

Already Bell and Gemmell have played around with this effect using the SenseCam data by developing a screen saver that displays random snapshots from their personal archives. Bell finds it oddly mesmerizing: Pictures of long-ago birthdays or family trips will trigger waves of nostalgia, he says. But Czerwinski predicts that a similar screen saver could become a killer app in the office. When you're working on a project, the screen saver would cycle randomly through any documents, pictures, emails, or Web pages pertaining to your work--and you would see if the unpredictable combinations inspired fresh ways of understanding it. "You'd see some memo you wrote two years ago and think, 'Oh, right, that was a good idea. Why didn't I follow up on that?'" she says.

But the real goal is "to discover things that even you didn't know that you knew," says Bradley Rhodes, a computer scientist with Ricoh Innovations. In the lifelogging community, Rhodes is famous for creating the "Remembrance Agent," an experimental piece of software, as a PhD student at MIT. The Agent sits in the corner of your screen and pays attention to everything you type; every few seconds it checks inside your hard drive to see if it can find anything relevant. If it does, it alerts you in the corner of your screen by showing a line or two of the related document.

The connections the Agent discovers are surprising, often valuable. When Rhodes first started using it, he'd begin writing an email to ask a colleague a question, but before he could even push "send," the Agent would reveal that a long-forgotten document on his hard drive already contained the answer. Other times, a colleague would email him a question and the Agent would remind Rhodes that he'd been asked that once before and had forgotten to reply. "So, in mid-email, I realize I have to switch gears and apologize and go, 'Sorry for not getting back to you.' It actually would change my behavior," he says. By actively reminding you of things from the past, "it keeps you from looking stupid." Now there's a killer app.

After using the Remembrance Agent for a while, Rhodes got a reputation for uncanny recall. "I'd have people emailing me saying, 'Hey, Brad, I know you've got this augmented brain. Can you answer this?' And sometimes I could." He imagines the Agent as particularly useful for lawyers and other paranoid execs drowning in paperwork. They could cram every sensitive email and memo related to a corporate crisis into their computers and let the Agent monitor them on the periphery.