Do you know the capital of Madagascar? Who cares—if for some reason you ever need it, in three seconds the omnipresent Google will tell you not only its name, but also how to get there and how long it takes, and it will even invite you on a virtual stroll.
In what year did World War II begin? Presto, there it is—why would we bother remembering?!
Not so long ago we all “carried” the phone numbers of family and friends in our heads. Meaningless, illogical strings of digits… Today we struggle to remember even our own number.
The web has forever changed our relationship with knowledge as such. Storing facts is far from a priority for our brains anymore. In more and more professions it’s not a problem to look things up online even during a job interview. Today the ability to find what you need quickly and accurately has replaced actually knowing.
Is this changing us as a species? What enormous challenges does it open up? Why does this fundamental shift bring both serious opportunities and countless risks?
Oh, Do You Remember, Madam?
“Who controls the past controls the future,” says a constantly quoted book whose title is a four-digit number. Do you remember which one?
It is memory that makes us human. Collective and personal. And we are delegating it more and more to machines.
If we peek into Wikipedia, which we have grown used to treating as the universal source of impartial information, we will always find things quite different from those that greet us in history textbooks.
The truth is never absolute, but there are still facts that are beyond dispute—for example, the capital we mentioned.
But what if you went in and changed it in the “universal” Wikipedia? At least a few people after you would get the wrong information. And what if the Malagasy themselves moved it? How long would it take search engines to start delivering the correct answer?
Do You Remember, Do You Remember the Quiet Yard
By sinking into ever deeper dependence on sources of information beyond our control, we expose ourselves to serious risks. What would happen if, say, Wikipedia shut down? If something went wrong and the site we rely on to store our files got hacked?
As we have already discussed, truth is not what’s valued on today’s internet. Search engines don’t strive to give you the most accurate answer, but rather the one you are looking for, the one that will do the job. At first glance that last sentence sounds like a tautology; the difference is subtle, but very important.
Optimizing a page’s content so that it ranks as well as possible online is a whole profession today. One that is also guided not by accuracy, but by a set of factors that search engines take into account.
On top of that, on the internet anything can be changed deliberately. If it’s a historical fact that doesn’t appear on very many pages, a bit of persistence and dexterity is enough to create a parallel history. Especially with the help of social media.
Just Forget About Me
And what if we simply switch languages? If, for instance, we looked at our shared Balkan history over the last century through the lens of different languages, what picture would emerge? Do you still believe the internet knows everything and can deliver the absolute truth?
Memory is something that formally brings us closer to computers. The more memory your laptop has, the more valuable information it can hold, right? Except that it, too, increasingly relies on information stored in the cloud, in the shared memory.
If there is one truth and one shared memory, that will unite us, won’t it? And it will erase our individuality, because the nuances fall victim—those indispensable companions in the search for truth.
But Not Oblivion, Not Oblivion
So these days you don’t need to know the notorious capital of the African island at all? You don’t even need to know that Madagascar is an island?
Probably so. At first glance, there is no reason nowadays to need any peripheral knowledge, unless you are preparing to appear on a TV quiz show. Life online pushes us in this direction too—the convenience of having facts at our fingertips makes us devalue their importance and regard people who hoard pointless trivia as junk dealers of memory.
All of this covers not only shared information, but also our own, most personal data. Today we recall what happened a year ago not by leafing through photo albums, but through the memories Facebook and Google pick out for us on their pages.
A Memorable Performance
But are these really our memories? Could the algorithm decide to delete our photos with a particular friend? To choose what we remember?
Sometimes being too intelligent can become a problem and make life harder rather than easier. You may remember who told us so—none other than “the most intelligent woman on the planet”.
Sometimes forgetting is a blessing—after terrible experiences, for example. Brain implants capable of erasing specific memories are already being successfully developed. The Japanese scientists who made a breakthrough in this area say their invention will save many people from mental illness. That would, of course, be wonderful, but… bad memories are also an inseparable part of our lives; otherwise, human salvation might truly lie in all sorts of stimulants. And what if someone else decides which memories stay and which disappear?
And yet, once again: it is memory that makes us human. Or something more. It is what allows us, by accumulating facts from different fields, to find the connections between them. Through layers of knowledge and sensation, it lets us create exquisite, profound works of art, communicate fully, and value the beautiful and the meaningful.
I Remember That I Remember Nothing
As a species, we have always relied on some kind of “external memory,” not only to make storing data easier, but also to have a shared reference point that keeps it consistent. For example, the phone book—remember those thick volumes we dug through as kids, hunting for weird names to bother in the small hours? Or the calendar on the wall, reminding everyone in the family that today is August 28 and a Tuesday.
Gradually, however, just as computers do, we began relying more and more on this external memory. As a result, it is easier for us to forget the basic things we were supposed to do. And we end up making online to-do lists to remind us to take out the trash.
You may not have heard of it, but there is an extreme version of “offloading” to external memory called lifelogging. Lifelogger Gordon Bell wears a camera on his head at all times to record everything that happens to him. That way, he believes, he will have every moment of his life preserved to pass on. And to use: he is working on a system that would let him search everything he has ever heard.
Oh, Unforgettable Past
So what: is “digital amnesia” shrinking our internal memory, the things we store in our brains? It’s not that simple, but there is no doubt that the way we manage it is changing.
Once we intuitively stop trying to remember supposedly useless facts, the next factor kicks in. The speed at which we take in information today, our inability to read long texts, the constant barrage of online messages—all of this makes remembering even harder.
“Forgetfulness is a sign of how busy we are,” says Zaldy Tan, director of a memory disorders clinic in Boston. “When we don’t pay enough attention, the memories we form are unstable, and then we have trouble retrieving the information when we need it.”
A Memory of Light
“We humans have always been a species that conquers its environment by creating new tools that amplify our own abilities. Unfortunately, psychological research has long been asleep on the question of how people today use technology to support the way they perceive the world,” says Jason Finley, a professor of psychology at Fontbonne University. He is the author of the book Memory and Technology: How We Use Information in the Brain and the World.
In his view, this extremely obvious and important topic keeps falling through the cracks between neighboring fields of knowledge such as psychology, philosophy, anthropology and information science. “Memory really is everything that we are. But memory is not necessarily reality,” says Prof. Finley.
He decided to conduct a survey of nearly 500 people, who shared how they use technology to remember things.
Past Perfect
“It turned out that the symbiosis between external and internal memory is steadily growing. Many people noted that they worry about relying too much on external memory, or that their internal memory ‘works’ worse and worse. Others were enthusiastic, seeing the new apps as an incredible opportunity that gives them an extra resource to do better intellectually and socially,” says Prof. Finley.
Most people in the survey believe that technology opens up an incredible opportunity. By “taking over” some of our tedious memories, it frees up our minds, letting us reason, find connections and create—precisely the things that set us apart from machines.
That is certainly true. The big question, however, is: are we really taking advantage of this opportunity?
Epic of the Forgetful
“Of course, it would be a mistake to say that technology is destroying our memory,” the psychologist is adamant. “But we can certainly say that it is changing it drastically. We ‘offload’ some information into external memory and use it, supposedly to free up our internal memory for other kinds of information.”
But, as the expert says, the human brain doesn’t fill up and empty like a hard drive. Unlike machines, the capacity of our long-term memory is practically unlimited, even though we still know far too little about how it works. “It’s exactly the opposite of what intuition tells us: the more knowledge we accumulate, the greater our capacity to learn more, and that information is distributed as patterns across a vast network of neurons throughout the cerebral cortex.”
When memory is external, the way we can reach it suddenly becomes very important. That is why the real skill is choosing the keywords that will get you the information online. According to Prof. Finley, as a result we now shape our thoughts to fit the way our external memory is organized.
Memento mori
Which brings us to another rather unexpected consequence of “shared memory.” Throughout our evolution, when a person passed away, their memory left with them, and they “left behind” only what they chose to, telling it to their children and friends or writing it in diaries. Today, however, a huge part of that memory remains online, because it has been delegated. We leave behind gigabytes of letters, texts, photos and videos.
Of course, on the one hand this doesn’t matter, because we pile up such huge volumes of everyday activity online that there’s no way to process them meaningfully. But this massive shared memory can become an enormous factor if, for instance, the person was a celebrity. Or if something reaches your heirs that you would never have wanted them to see. After all, for most people what memory of them remains on Earth matters far more than any material possessions.
And what about the shared memory of someone who hasn’t passed away but has simply left their job? Is it ethical for their successor to use it, and to what extent exactly?
One more thing: the shared memory accumulated online, garnished with ever more advanced algorithms, opens the next page of big questions. Could an artificial intelligence be created that imitates a particular person based on the huge mass of external memory they left behind? And won’t manipulation algorithms keep getting better too, now that they have data that will pile up over generations and grow ever more detailed because of our tendency to rely more and more on our “online mind”?
The River of Oblivion
Our brains contain about 86 billion neurons, each with thousands of connections made through hundreds of trillions of synapses—the junctions between neurons through which our memory “works.” Although we still don’t know much about the exact process by which it all happens, neuroscientists today are making growing progress in tracing engrams—the changes that occur when our brain encounters new information, the way it stores it.
This makes it increasingly possible to “see” remembering. And the next step is to reproduce it—technologies that can “read minds” are becoming ever more refined, able to draw what a person is picturing at a given moment.
At the same time, work continues on interfaces that would connect us directly to the web—such as the notorious Neuralink.
Are we ready to move for good into the era of collective memory?
Can Georgi Be Forgotten?
“Writing leads us to forgetfulness,” Socrates said two millennia ago.
“The better part of our memory exists outside us,” Marcel Proust wrote more than a century ago. “In a rainy breeze, in the musty air of a room, or in the smell of the first crackling flame in a cold fireplace.”
I confess I don’t know these quotes by heart; I found them on Google. (But are they accurate?)
Along with the way we “acquire” information, the way we store it today is one of the big technology topics we don’t have time to read and think about. Gradually, though, it is making its way onto the agenda, and the first herald is art.
In recent months, Georgi Gospodinov’s Time Shelter has become not only the most-read Bulgarian novel, but also one of the most highly acclaimed in every new country it reaches. “I wrote (and erased) about the mixing of times, when memory, personal and shared, packs its bags and leaves,” the author writes on the cover.
It truly matters that we remember and treat our memory responsibly, because we are our memories… Oh, and if you agree, and if you decide it’s useful to know after all, the capital of Madagascar is Antananarivo.
