Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is Changing Our Minds for the Better. Clive Thompson

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СКАЧАТЬ has also, in an unexpected way, transformed Roy’s personal life. It turns out that by creating an insanely nuanced scientific record of his son’s first two years, Roy has created the most detailed memoir in history.

      For example, he’s got a record of the first day his son walked. On-screen, you can see Roy step out of the bathroom and notice the boy standing, with a pre-toddler’s wobbly balance, about six feet away. Roy holds out his arms and encourages him to walk over: “Come on, come on, you can do it,” he urges. His son lurches forward one step, then another, and another—his first time successfully doing this. On the audio, you can actually hear the boy squeak to himself in surprise: Wow! Roy hollers to his mother, who’s visiting and is in the kitchen: “He’s walking! He’s walking!”

      It’s rare to catch this moment on video for any parent. But there’s something even more unusual about catching it unintentionally. Unlike most first-step videos caught by a camera-phone-equipped parent, Roy wasn’t actively trying to freeze this moment; he didn’t get caught up in the strange, quintessentially modern dilemma that comes from trying to simultaneously experience something delightful while also acting and getting it on tape. (When we brought my son a candle-bedecked cupcake on his first birthday, I spent so much time futzing with snapshots—it turns out cheap cameras don’t focus well when the lights are turned off—that I later realized I hadn’t actually watched the moment with my own eyes.) You can see Roy genuinely lost in the moment, enthralled. Indeed, he only realized weeks after his son walked that he could hunt down the digital copy; when he pulled it out, he was surprised to find he’d completely misremembered the event. “I originally remembered it being a sunny morning, my wife in the kitchen,” he says. “And when we finally got the video it was not a sunny morning, it was evening; and it was not my wife in the kitchen, it was my mother.”

      Roy can perform even crazier feats of recall. His system is able to stitch together the various video streams into a 3-D view. This allows you to effectively “fly” around a recording, as if you were inside a video game. You can freeze a moment, watch it backward, all while flying through; it’s like a TiVo for reality. He zooms into the scene of his watching his son, freezes it, then flies down the hallway into the kitchen, where his mother is looking up, startled, reacting to his yells of delight. It seems wildly futuristic, but Roy claims that eventually it won’t be impossible to do in your own home: cameras and hard drives are getting cheaper and cheaper, and the software isn’t far off either.

      Still, as Roy acknowledges, the whole project is unsettling to some observers. “A lot of people have asked me, ‘Are you insane?’” He chuckles. They regard the cameras as Orwellian, though this isn’t really accurate; it’s Roy who’s recording himself, not a government or evil corporation, after all. But still, wouldn’t living with incessant recording corrode daily life, making you afraid that your weakest moments—bickering mean-spiritedly with your spouse about the dishes, losing your temper over something stupid, or, frankly, even having sex—would be recorded forever? Roy and his wife say this didn’t happen, because they were in control of the system. In each room there was a control panel that let you turn off the camera or audio; in general, they turned things off at 10 p.m. (after the baby was in bed) and back on at 8 a.m. They also had an “oops” button in every room: hit it, and you could erase as much as you wanted from recent recordings—a few minutes, an hour, even a day. It was a neat compromise, because of course one often doesn’t know when something embarrassing is going to happen until it’s already happening.

      “This came up from, you know, my wife breast-feeding,” Roy says. “Or I’d stumble out of the shower, dripping and naked, wander out in the hallway—then realize what I was doing and hit the ‘oops’ button. I didn’t think my grad students needed to see that.” He also experienced the effect that documentarians and reality TV producers have long noticed: after a while, the cameras vanish.

      The downsides, in other words, were worth the upsides—both scientific and personal. In 2007, Roy’s father came over to see his grandson when Roy was away at work. A few months later, his father had a stroke and died suddenly. Roy was devastated; he’d known his father’s health was in bad shape but hadn’t expected the end to come so soon.

      Months later, Roy realized that he’d missed the chance to see his father play with his grandson for the last time. But the house had autorecorded it. Roy went to the TotalRecall system and found the video stream. He pulled it up: his father stood in the living room, lifting his grandson, tickling him, cooing over how much he’d grown.

      Roy froze the moment and slowly panned out, looking at the scene, rewinding it and watching again, drifting around to relive it from several angles.

      “I was floating around like a ghost watching him,” he says.

      What would it be like to never forget anything? To start off your life with that sort of record, then keep it going until you die?

      Memory is one of the most crucial and mysterious parts of our identities; take it away, and identity goes away, too, as families wrestling with Alzheimer’s quickly discover. Marcel Proust regarded the recollection of your life as a defining task of humanity; meditating on what you’ve done is an act of recovering, literally hunting around for “lost time.” Vladimir Nabokov saw it a bit differently: in Speak, Memory, he sees his past actions as being so deeply intertwined with his present ones that he declares, “I confess I do not believe in time.”⁵ (As Faulkner put it, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”)⁶

      In recent years, I’ve noticed modern culture—in the United States, anyway—becoming increasingly, almost frenetically obsessed with lapses of memory. This may be because the aging baby-boomer population is skidding into its sixties, when forgetting the location of your keys becomes a daily embarrassment. Newspaper health sections deliver panicked articles about memory loss and proffer remedies, ranging from advice that is scientifically solid (get more sleep and exercise) to sketchy (take herbal supplements like ginkgo) to corporate snake oil (play pleasant but probably useless “brain fitness” video games.) We’re pretty hard on ourselves. Frailties in memory are seen as frailties in intelligence itself. In the run-up to the American presidential election of 2012, the candidacy of a prominent hopeful, Rick Perry, began unraveling with a single, searing memory lapse: in a televised debate, when he was asked about the three government bureaus he’d repeatedly vowed to eliminate, Perry named the first two—but was suddenly unable to recall the third. He stood there onstage, hemming and hawing for fifty-three agonizing seconds before the astonished audience, while his horrified political advisers watched his candidacy implode. (“It’s over, isn’t it?” one of Perry’s donors asked.)⁷

      Yet the truth is, the politician’s mishap wasn’t all that unusual. On the contrary, it was extremely normal. Our brains are remarkably bad at remembering details. They’re great at getting the gist of something, but they consistently muff the specifics. Whenever we read a book or watch a TV show or wander down the street, we extract the meaning of what we see—the parts of it that make sense to us and fit into our overall picture of the world—but we lose everything else, in particular discarding the details that don’t fit our predetermined biases. This sounds like a recipe for disaster, but scientists point out that there’s an upside to this faulty recall. If we remembered every single detail of everything, we wouldn’t be able to make sense of anything. Forgetting is a gift and a curse: by chipping away at what we experience in everyday life, we leave behind a sculpture that’s meaningful to us, even if sometimes it happens to be wrong.

      Our first glimpse into the way we forget came in the 1880s, when German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus ran a long, fascinating experiment on himself.⁸ He created twenty-three hundred “nonsense” three-letter combinations and memorized them. Then he’d test himself at regular periods to see how many he could remember. He discovered that memory decays quickly after you’ve learned something: Within twenty СКАЧАТЬ