Humour

Log in for total recall

T A Balasubramanian explains how human beings are running out of memory

Once again, it is time to drop in on Bobo Jitter, the ever-quirky CIO at Bazooka Company, as he settles down for another session with Dr Don Jong. Dr Jong, fondly known to his admirers as The Oddfather, has many unorthodox techniques for decoding the never-ending puzzles that keep popping out of technology’s looming frontiers.

“You seem to be on edge, Bobo. Now what seems to be the, ah, fly in the ointment that makes you hold your head with both hands and wear such a frozen expression?”

“I think I am losing my mind, Doc.”

“Hmm. That is a very sweeping assertion. How do you jump to that conclusion?”

“I have been noting a strange phenomenon in my daily life. It has been creeping up on me slowly, so maybe it was under my radar for a while.”

“Under your radar? And what does that mean?”

“I mean, it is one of those things that grow insidiously—like moss on a rock—and you do not observe it happening until you touch the rock and suddenly feel it to be wet and sticky, instead of firm and dry as usual.”

“Bobo, I am befuddled. First, under your radar. Now, a wet rock?”

“Oh, sorry, Doc. What I mean to say is that I am forgetting too many things.”

“Ah, so we are getting absent minded? That’s perfectly all right. Happens to me all the time.”

“No, I mean that I cannot remember a single friend’s email address. Hell, sometimes I have to search my electronic mail box to remember a supplier’s last name. And when it comes to technology trivia—like website names, famous blogs, names of IT media that I subscribe to—I have almost given up making an effort to remember anything.”

“And this annoying forgetfulness is what is worrying you?”

“Well, Doc, it is more than that. It is all because I can instantly retrieve the information online from this nasty flood of digital data at my fingertips. It is too much to bear, the agony of this absurd convenience.”

“Why does that cause you agony, my boy? If anything, it should make you happy.”

“I am upset because I feel no guilt or shame when I cannot remember these things. I have let my human memory cells become too flabby. I am just a few steps away from having no memory at all for anything in my professional or social life.”

“You do have a colourful memory for turning your everyday problems into melodrama, my boy. But you are right about one thing, though. We are running out of memory. I do not mean computer memory. That stuff is available by the sackful in pen drives and laptops these days. No, I am talking about human memory, stored in the grey matter inside our heads. According to recent research, we are being relieved from the burden of recollecting more and more basic facts these days.”

“But is that not dangerous for the human race, Doc?”

“Well, it depends on what you consider important as part of your human profile, Bobo. It seems that we have been moving in this direction ever since the simplest calculators appeared on the scene. We think nothing of using a pocket gizmo to do a few price computations—especially those among us who were never too sharp in mathematics. Even I have trouble with my multiplication tables beyond six times eight on those days when I forget to carry my calculator. Annoying? Yes. But hardly something I would call a loss to the hereditary gene pool.”

“Calculations are fine, Doc. Nobody holds it against you if you are not a math wizard. It is the social disconnect arising out of our more expanded zone of forgetting little facts in general that bothers me. What about the old-fashioned polite urge we used to have for memorizing bits of information—like birthdays and names of spouses and children—that were useful when we had to make phone calls or meet up with a friend for tea? It surely made our friendships bloom when we could remember such titbits.”

“Times have changed, Bobo, and so have our customs. There was a study made recently by a neuroscientist who polled 3,000 people and found that the younger ones were less able than their elders to recall standard personal data. When the subjects were asked to recall a relative’s birth date, 87 percent of respondents over age 50 could recite it, while less than 40 percent of those under 30 could do so. And when he asked them their own phone number, fully one-third of the youngsters drew a blank. They had to pull out their mobile phones to look it up.”

“So reaching into your pocket instead of your head for the answer is all right?”

“And why not? Mobile phones can store hundreds of numbers in their memory, so why would you bother trying to cram the same string of otherwise useless random numbers into your own memory? The younger generation today are the first to grow up with go-everywhere gadgets and services that exist specifically to remember things so that we do not have to. But for us elders of the tribe, it is a challenge, I admit, to be so gizmo-dependent. Maybe you could turn the forgetting process into a grand evolutionary path upward, Bobo.”

“How so, Doc?”

“Well, think about it. Your old world human memory cells were not designed to carry such a high burden as is demanded by the pressure of modern social activity. Maybe it is a good thing that we are getting hooked increasingly on silicon memory and the ever-present online brain. In fact, the line between where my memory leaves off and where Google picks up is getting more obscure by the day. When it is this simple to search and find what you want, why not surrender a bit of your brain? You could say that by offloading data onto silicon, we free our own minds for more interesting fun tasks like brainstorming and daydreaming. And of course, with the perfect recall of silicon memory, you do not ever have to worry about missing a single detail.”

“You’re right, Doc. Even when I am talking on the phone, I toggle between Wikipedia and search engines to explore the subject at hand, gleefully reading from the screen to buttress my arguments like a master mind. Frankly, I kind of like it even though it makes me feel guilty. I feel much smarter when I am using the Internet as a mental plug-in during my chat. Suppose you mention the latest Crichton book, ‘Next’, that you are reading. I may have never read it, but in a few seconds I would have seen on Amazon a summary of the plot, the major twists, and the flaws in the story. Machine memory even alters the way I write—I can pull up links and comments from blogs, making my very words bloom and shine with extra intelligence.”

“Voila, you comprehend, eh? The days of plain old leaky human memory are numbered. Almost without noticing it, we have outsourced important peripheral brain functions to the silicon around us. We may even find it a sign of advanced culture when nobody remembers anything in their own heads.”