Total Recall

How much would you pay to have a small memory chip implanted in your brain if that chip would double the capacity of your short-term memory? Or guarantee that you would never again forget a face or a name?

There’s good reason to consider such offers. Although our memories are sometimes spectacular — we are very good at recognizing photos, for example — our memory capacities are often disappointing. Faulty memories have been known to lead to erroneous eyewitness testimony (and false imprisonment), to marital friction (in the form of overlooked anniversaries) and even death (sky divers have been known to forget to pull their ripcords — accounting, by one estimate, for approximately 6 percent of sky-diving fatalities). The dubious dynamics of memory leave us vulnerable to the predations of spin doctors (because a phrase like “death tax” automatically brings to mind a different set of associations than “estate tax”), the pitfalls of stereotyping (in which easily accessible memories wash out less common counterexamples) and what the psychologist Timothy Wilson calls “mental contamination.” To the extent that we frequently can’t separate relevant information from irrelevant information, memory is often the culprit.

All this becomes even more poignant when you compare our memories to those of the average laptop. Whereas it takes the average human child weeks or even months or years to memorize something as simple as a multiplication table, any modern computer can memorize any table in an instant — and never forget it. Why can’t we do the same?

Much of the difference lies in the basic organization of memory. Computers organize everything they store according to physical or logical locations, with each bit stored in a specific place according to some sort of master map, but we have no idea where anything in our...

Some things of interest on that subject.

Back in 1970, Alvin Toffler posited what he called Future Shock, that people would not be able to adjust to the overwhelming glut of data in their lives. And at that time, he was quite correct, that our rate of technological change was such that we were being overwhelmed by both data and novelty.

However, the day was saved with the invention of the PC and the Internet, which serve as a personal storage and reference library of data, and even more importantly as a data aggregator of new information.

The intellectual value of this is enormous, as before, if you wanted to know something, you either had to ask someone or look it up in a book, possibly at a public library, or do without. Now, you just Google it. Without it, by now our civilization would be a very different one, indeed.

In turn, the common authoritarian practice of information control has become a nightmare to tyrants, as only the most closely guarded secrets remain secret.

In the last several years, a very rare phenomena did emerge of what is called “information overload”, the term taken from the macro scale, that is, too much data to aggregate for too few important bits of data; then applied to individual psychology.

As example, a woman went grocery shopping. She picked up a frozen turkey and was reading its label. Over an hour later an employee noticed her still standing there, holding the now defrosting turkey. She was unresponsive and rigid. After taking the turkey away, the employees called 911, then took her, stiff as a board, to a bench in front of the store.

Before the paramedics had arrived, she suddenly loosened and woke up, utterly puzzled. Psychologically, she was later described as her brain having gone into “erase” mode, wiping out an enormous amount of unwanted memories. For some reason, she did not have the typical ability to forget trivial information, and had “maxed out” her brain.

Again, a very rare incident, but interesting nonetheless.

But all of this implies several things. While the Internet and PCs are grand for basic data, they have no ability to perform the higher levels of data discrimination, analysis, evaluation, and especially synthesis of new data.

This implies that frequently accessed data should be carefully ordered in education, both so that it is readily accessible and so the majority of the mind can be given over to using a blend of memorized data and computer and Internet data input.

That is, for example, instead of memorizing multiplication tables in in inefficient and linear manner, they are learned as a two-dimensional matrix. Then, when you see a multiplication problem on your computer, you can quickly figure out that problem in your head.

But *then* you spend most of your brain power figuring out if that abstract equation *applies* to a real world problem. If it is the *best* solution, or an *adequate* solution, if it is a *practical* solution, an otherwise *appropriate* solution, etc. That is what the brain is best suited for.

Good points, all. When I think of an external enhancement to human memory, what I think of — the kind that would be most useful and least objectionable — would be a chip that would record the raw data from the five senses and protect it from the effects of later revision.

We already have forms of external memory, and in fact they’re one of the principal traits that distinguish humans from other species. We tell others, take notes, shoot photos, record video and audio, then compile the data and write books. Even in pre-literate societies, the oral tradition provides a way for someone’s knowledge and memory to outlive him.

This article barely scratches the surface of the ethical, legal, even philosophical and theological implications of wetware. Some uses are ones I’d love to have. One is the ability to selectively record the input of the five senses for later analysis and review, uncorrupted by later revisions, like we do with video tape. You could save a favorite sunset, or remember a book you read twenty years later as clearly as you did the moment you finished it.

Of course, given some of the fond memories people would like to relive, wetware, like nearly every new technology, has staggering imploications for the porn industry.

A memory chip could serve as a “black box” for the human brain, making it easier to solve crimes and assess what caused accidents. A wetware memory chip would be a hube advance in treating some illnesses and injury — an amnesiac, for example, could simply restore from the last known good backup, just like a crashed hard drive.

But the implications go far beyond the chip itself. In order to write to the chip, you first must read from the brain — and that completely reinvents interrogation, whether for good or bad purposes. There would inevitably be ways to retrieve memories, or even implant false or doctored ones, without the brain-owners permission (or even knowledge).

Then there’s the fact that anything that can be stored as digital data can be transmitted. Hidden cameras and microphones are nothing compared to a brain in the room that’s beaming out all five senses. Say goodbye to privacy as you’ve known it.

On the flip side, what we consider as intelligence may be a mutation closely associated with autism.

Intelligence is a secondary trait in natural selection, because it takes a long time for it to “produce results” that would be advantageous to survival and reproduction.

An interesting paradox is that an extended state of mental focus is needed for intelligence, which is kind of the flip side of the unfocused state used by artists to be creative. However, either of these states are not conducive to survival in a high risk environment.

That is, you neither want to be too focused or too unfocused when there are hungry tigers about.

For this reason, the human species invented and still use a trick to break up states of mental focus and unfocus. We call it talking to ourselves, or our internal dialogue. Adults train children to not stay too long in a focused or unfocused state, instead to vacillate between the two by talking to themselves.

But since there are far fewer tigers about these days, this trained inhibition just restricts both are intellect and our creativity. It is hard to do a test when you keep getting distracted, just as it is hard to meditate without “clearing your mind” first.

There are a bunch of techniques used to extend the period in which one can be focused or unfocused, and few complaints, as bouncing back between the two states takes a lot of energy. And being able to concentrate on a test instead of being distracted automatically makes you seem to be smarter because you make fewer mistakes.

It is ironic that often the people who stand out in our society as intellectuals, are actually high level autistics with Asperger’s disorder, like Bill Gates. Their autism means that they cannot easily learn internal dialogue, so that when they focus, they can do so for an extended period.

This is not “smart”, but it can do things that few intellectual people can do, because they have not learned how to shut off their internal dialogue for a while.

Importantly, people are so caught up in their internal dialogue discipline, that they do not like to see others who are focused or unfocused. The inclination is to interfere with them (or the tigers will get you). Thus training oneself to control internal dialogue is a private affair, or only done around others with the same intent.

Those who vacillate too much are almost tragic. First because they are intellectually exhausted. Second, because they come across like surfer bums, with no attention span. And third, because they try to substitute music and noise for their internal dialogue. They cannot stand quiet, because it means they have to use their own energy to fill in the gaps.

In the final analysis, if mnemonics and other intellectual enhancing techniques are to be incorporated into education, it will take a grand leap of the educational paradigm.

But imagine the capability of minds that can intellectually order vast amounts of abstract data, while eliminating much that is superfluous; and then maintain a fixed focus on the use of that data for extended periods. Conversely, spending hours in uninterrupted creative flights of fancy.

An average child might appear to have an IQ of 150 or more, and emotional and creative heights and depths far beyond the range of most anyone else.

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