Memory and its Failures

There is a ritual I perform on the drive over to a gathering of friends and acquaintances I haven’t seen in a while. Anticipating an evening filled with catching up on everyone’s lives, I take to Facebook to recall the names of children and the titles of jobs. It’s a way to recollect those fuzzy facts that hover at the periphery of my mind like vitreous floaters eccentric to my gaze. The more I try to recall such effervescent data on my own, the farther afield it seems to float away. I’m not entirely happy to have outsourced my memory to a technology, but it is an increasingly common phenomenon in these digital days and it makes me curious about what the downstream effects of such a radical shift in information storage and retrieval means for us all. 

Before GPS, I used to remember the names of roads within a stone’s throw from where I reside. If I had to direct someone to my home these days, I’d have to consult a maps app. We fill our days with streams of information: baby pictures, tweets, posts, news articles, memes, emails. The deluge seems to overwhelm the usual mental storage behaviors. My mind instinctually wants to have a neuronal recording of every piece of data that crosses my vision, but with the sheer magnitude of information I expose myself to, it simply isn’t up for the task. I harbor the belief that there is a fixed quantity of facts I can fill my brain with and if I keep shoveling in random morsels throughout the day, I’ll have to sacrifice truly salient information. If I remembered the birthday of every child’s friend, I wouldn’t know how insulin worked. 

Was the mammalian brain built for storing endless ephemera of digital data? Apparently not, but now we’re outsourcing things we never thought we would. Knowledge, meaning the hard knowledge of facts, the kind of data that requires intense memorization and a thorough understanding of intricate mechanisms, used to be something to aspire to. In some circles, the most revered person in the room is the one who quotes Shakespeare and captivates a gathering with tidbits about World War II: the names of generals, the types of weapons deployed, the number of casualties. Our society puts a premium on such recall. But I can now access my phone and deliver the same information without undergoing such rigorous study. It’s one thing for my phone to remind me of my cousin’s daughter’s birthday, but when I google the various types of insulin I could offer my patient, I’ve decided that this data set is better stored out there than in here. This is quite a change. The notion that physicians would have to recall any drug or disease was once sacrosanct, but with more precise and reliable information just an app away, perhaps physician’s can now focus more on other aspects of disease that have historically received less attention.  

I have a hypothesis that there are subtle behavioral benefits that accrue as we increasingly outsource more and more information to devices. Perhaps unburdening the mind of objective data results in more intellectual space afforded to contemplate the more emotional or psychological aspects of experience. For example, imagine that instead of focusing on the memorization and regurgitation of facts about WWII, we instead focus on the narrative aspects of conflicts. Rather than filling our brains with factoids about battles won and lost, treaties negotiated and violated, we turn our attention to the emotional aspects of the war. What were the cultural factors that fueled the German lust for hegemony? How did the letters American GIs sent home affect the public’s wholehearted embrace of the war effort? Perhaps physicians could more readily entertain the psychosocial aspects of their patient’s illness with greater sincerity as many cognitive tasks are subsumed by powerful digital tools. How has taking insulin changed your life? What barriers are you facing toward being more compliant with your injections? 

The outsourcing of memory offers us the potential to use our brain capacity to serve more humanistic ends. We can optimize rhetoric by engaging in more narrative story-telling. We can probe history for the emotional lives of victims and victimizers. For far too long, we’ve placed a premium on remembering facts, on recalling things, but perhaps we were mistaken in positioning the acquisition and storage and retrieval of hard data so high up the pedestal of intellectual pursuits. Perhaps soft data, emotional intelligence, psychological insight, metaphysical awareness will become the new goal for the intellectually aspirational. It’s possible that what we gain most in outsourcing memory to digital devices is a greater capacity to feel and behave more human.