Would total recall be a curse or a boon? I ask because a recent book “Total Recall: How the eMemory revolution will change everything” started me thinking.
100% memory, in the form of digital files and images, perhaps enhanced by newer as-yet-undiscovered sensors, will be with us soon. This is a given part of the techno-revolution we are living through.
The book has a glowing introduction by Bill Gates and it all seems to take the point of view this is a good thing. But is it?
Even if we wished to, we may not be able to forget. Because you get the stuff beaten out of you at school for forgetting doesn’t mean all forgetting is bad! We have to filter some of our impressions, otherwise we would go into overload.
In fact, as I have written elsewhere, we have to selectively (and wisely) UN-remember certain things just to function at all. We have naturally in-built mechanisms to do this for us. Who can foresee what will happen if we forecefully override these mechanisms?
Anyway, who cares about out past, except us? Isn’t it just vanity; to believe that our little lives, of all those in history, are the ones that really matter? That we should be preserved, when greats such as St. Thomas Aquinas, Buddha and Beethoven have no “substance” of their selves and lives left behind?
Why would our kids and grandkids want to know all our stuff? They should be getting on with their own lives and living fully in the stream of progress of the human condition.
By chance, another review from the same writer looked at the opposite book. It’s title is “Delete: The virtue of forgetting in the digital age”.
The authors recognize that forgetting is at least as important as remembering; that we would surely lose our human-ness (and self-image), if we couldn’t set aside at least some of our inconvenient memories. Otherwise we might live the nightmare life of mnemonist Solomon Shereshevsky (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solomon_Shereshevsky)
Shereshevsky was a Russian journalist with perfect memory. He was able to memorize 70-digit matrices, complex scientific formulae, even poems in foreign languages, in a matter of minutes. He could also report extensive lists of numbers or letters in reverse order. Not only this, he remembered these lists years afterwards when re-tested.
Unfortunately, Shereshevsky’s gift was also a serious handicap. For example, he had a terrible memory for faces because he memorized them so exactly. People’s faces change with time, lighting, mood, and expression. Shereshevsky had difficulty recognizing faces because, as time went by, they looked so different to him from the ones he had completely memorized in the past.
His pathological memory interfered with Shereshevsky’s ability to hold a regular job, enjoy literature, or even seemingly to think in the abstract without being distracted by sensory association. He just couldn’t forget ANYTHING!
Yet in the digital age we may never be allowed the luxury of totally forgetting something we CHOOSE to forget. These are sobering thoughts and maybe it hasn’t worried you before. Well, it should!