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I think I’m becoming addicted to google. It’s the first port of call for anything I can’t immediately recall these days. Partly it’s having one’s horizons broadened by the dreaded internet but there are things I know I know. What’s the longest lived insect? Why should there be only two sexes? But I don’t give my memories the time to percolate, to come up with the answer, it’s keyboard first think later. Probably there have been people making similar complaints since the advent of papyrus but it feels a little sad. I like being able to remember things. I like that feeling of almost, not quite knowing and then suddenly the memory pops up to the surface like a bubble trapped briefly in a bend. (Because my brain is like a sewage system.)
A long time ago my 15 year old self tried to wage a campaign against taking photographs on holidays. Mostly because dad would always try to make them into an epic slide show production, which would end in an equally epic family argument over the kind of sheep that was. Or something. But also because the pictures always looked so much flatter than the memories. They lacked that odd tunnel vision effect , that sense of darkness flickering at the periphery that the memories had.
This post was probably brought on by an article in the Guardian at Christmas about a project to make a digital facsimile of a man’s life. Partly to test the limits of the technology but potentially as an aid for certain types of dementia:
An early insight into a weakness of the system revealed how reliant Dr Bell had become on his "surrogate memory". The hard drive of his computer crashed, losing four months of data. In a report on the project, he describes it as "a severe emotional blow, perhaps like having one's memories taken away."
Dr Bell has also had to wrestle with the knowledge that, barring crashes, he has lost the luxury of forgetting.
A long time ago my 15 year old self tried to wage a campaign against taking photographs on holidays. Mostly because dad would always try to make them into an epic slide show production, which would end in an equally epic family argument over the kind of sheep that was. Or something. But also because the pictures always looked so much flatter than the memories. They lacked that odd tunnel vision effect , that sense of darkness flickering at the periphery that the memories had.
This post was probably brought on by an article in the Guardian at Christmas about a project to make a digital facsimile of a man’s life. Partly to test the limits of the technology but potentially as an aid for certain types of dementia:
An early insight into a weakness of the system revealed how reliant Dr Bell had become on his "surrogate memory". The hard drive of his computer crashed, losing four months of data. In a report on the project, he describes it as "a severe emotional blow, perhaps like having one's memories taken away."
Dr Bell has also had to wrestle with the knowledge that, barring crashes, he has lost the luxury of forgetting.