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

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СКАЧАТЬ it had dwindled to about one third. But then the pace of forgetting slowed down. Six days later the total had slipped just a bit more—to 25.4 percent of the material—and a month later it was only a little worse, at 21.1 percent. Essentially, he had lost the great majority of the three-word combinations, but the few that remained had passed into long-term memory. This is now known as the Ebbinghaus curve of forgetting, and it’s a good-news-bad-news story: Not much gets into long-term memory, but what gets there sticks around.

      Ebbinghaus had set himself an incredibly hard memory task. Meaningless gibberish is by nature hard to remember. In the 1970s and ’80s, psychologist Willem Wagenaar tried something a bit more true to life.⁹ Once a day for six years, he recorded a few of the things that happened to him on notecards, including details like where it happened and who he was with. (On September 10, 1983, for example, he went to see Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper in Milan with his friend Elizabeth Loftus, the noted psychologist). This is what psychologists call “episodic” or “autobiographical” memory—things that happen to us personally. Toward the end of the experiment, Wagenaar tested himself by pulling out a card to see if he remembered the event. He discovered that these episodic memories don’t degrade anywhere near as quickly as random information: In fact, he was able to recall about 70 percent of the events that had happened a half year ago, and his memory gradually dropped to 29 percent for events five years old. Why did he do better than Ebbinghaus? Because the cards contained “cues” that helped jog his memory—like knowing that his friend Liz Loftus was with him—and because some of the events were inherently more memorable. Your ability to recall something is highly dependent on the context in which you’re trying to do so; if you have the right cues around, it gets easier. More important, Wagenaar also showed that committing something to memory in the first place is much simpler if you’re paying close attention. If you’re engrossed in an emotionally vivid visit to a da Vinci painting, you’re far more likely to recall it; your everyday humdrum Monday meeting, not so much. (And if you’re frantically multitasking on a computer, paying only partial attention to a dozen tasks, you might only dimly remember any of what you’re doing, a problem that I’ll talk about many times in this book.) But even so, as Wagenaar found, there are surprising limits. For fully 20 percent of the events he recorded, he couldn’t remember anything at all.

      Even when we’re able to remember an event, it’s not clear we’re remembering it correctly. Memory isn’t passive; it’s active.¹⁰ It’s not like pulling a sheet from a filing cabinet and retrieving a precise copy of the event. You’re also regenerating the memory on the fly. You pull up the accurate gist, but you’re missing a lot of details. So you imaginatively fill in the missing details with stuff that seems plausible, whether or not it’s actually what happened. There’s a reason why we call it “re-membering”; we reassemble the past like Frankenstein assembling a body out of parts. That’s why Deb Roy was so stunned to look into his TotalRecall system and realize that he’d mentally mangled the details of his son’s first steps. In reality, Roy’s mother was in the kitchen and the sun was down—but Roy remembered it as his wife being in the kitchen on a sunny morning. As a piece of narrative, it’s perfectly understandable. The memory feels much more magical that way: The sun shining! The boy’s mother nearby! Our minds are drawn to what feels true, not what’s necessarily so. And worse, these filled-in errors may actually compound over time. Some memory scientists suspect that when we misrecall something, we can store the false details in our memory in what’s known as reconsolidation.¹¹ So the next time we remember it, we’re pulling up false details; maybe we’re even adding new errors with each act of recall. Episodic memory becomes a game of telephone played with oneself.

      The malleability of memory helps explain why, over decades, we can adopt a surprisingly rewritten account of our lives. In 1962, the psychologist Daniel Offer asked a group¹² of fourteen-year-old boys questions about significant aspects of their lives. When he hunted them down thirty-four years later and asked them to think back on their teenage years and answer precisely the same questions, their answers were remarkably different. As teenagers, 70 percent said religion was helpful to them; in their forties, only 26 percent recalled that. Fully 82 percent of the teenagers said their parents used corporal punishment, but three decades later, only one third recalled their parents hitting them. Over time, the men had slowly revised their memories, changing them to suit the ongoing shifts in their personalities, or what’s called hindsight bias. If you become less religious as an adult, you might start thinking that’s how you were as a child, too.

      For eons, people have fought back against the fabrications of memory by using external aids. We’ve used chronological diaries for at least two millennia, and every new technological medium increases the number of things we capture: George Eastman’s inexpensive Brownie camera gave birth to everyday photography, and VHS tape did the same thing for personal videos in the 1980s. In the last decade, though, the sheer welter of artificial memory devices has exploded, so there are more tools capturing shards of our lives than ever before—e-mail, text messages, camera phone photos and videos, note-taking apps and word processing, GPS traces, comments, and innumerable status updates. (And those are just the voluntary recordings you participate in. There are now innumerable government and corporate surveillance cameras recording you, too.)

      The biggest shift is that most of this doesn’t require much work. Saving artificial memories used to require foresight and effort, which is why only a small fraction of very committed people kept good diaries. But digital memory is frequently passive. You don’t intend to keep all your text messages, but if you’ve got a smartphone, odds are they’re all there, backed up every time you dock your phone. Dashboard cams on Russian cars are supposed to help drivers prove their innocence in car accidents, but because they’re always on, they also wound up recording a massive meteorite entering the atmosphere. Meanwhile, today’s free e-mail services like Gmail are biased toward permanent storage; they offer such capacious memory that it’s easier for the user to keep everything than to engage in the mental effort of deciding whether to delete each individual message. (This is an intentional design decision on Google’s part, of course; the more they can convince us to retain e-mail, the more data about our behavior they have in order to target ads at us more effectively.) And when people buy new computers, they rarely delete old files—in fact, research shows that most of us just copy our old hard drives¹³ onto our new computers, and do so again three years later with our next computers, and on and on, our digital external memories nested inside one other like wooden dolls. The cost of storage has plummeted so dramatically that it’s almost comical to consider: In 1981, a gigabyte of memory cost roughly three hundred thousand dollars, but now it can be had for pennies.

      We face an intriguing inversion point in human memory. We’re moving from a period in which most of the details of our lives were forgotten to one in which many, perhaps most of them, will be captured. How will that change the way we live—and the way we understand the shape of our lives?

      There’s a small community of people who’ve been trying to figure this out by recording as many bits of their lives as they can as often as possible. They don’t want to lose a detail; they’re trying to create perfect recall, to find out what it’s like. They’re the lifeloggers.

      When I interview someone, I take pretty obsessive notes: not only everything they say, but also what they look like, how they talk. Within a few minutes of meeting Gordon Bell, I realized I’d met my match: His digital records of me were thousands of times more complete than my notes about him.

      Bell is probably the world’s most ambitious and committed lifelogger.¹⁴ A tall and genial white-haired seventy-eight-year-old, he walks around outfitted with a small fish-eye camera hanging around his neck, snapping pictures every sixty seconds, and a tiny audio recorder that captures most conversations. Software on his computer saves a copy of every Web page he looks at and every e-mail he sends or receives, even a recording of every phone call.

      “Which is probably illegal, but what the hell,” he says with a guffaw. “I never know what I’m going to СКАЧАТЬ