DIGITAL HYPERTHYMESIA ON THE CONSEQUENCES OF LIVING WITH PERFECT MEMORY Tanne van Bree 073 We are currently all living with Digital Hyperthymesia: a condition that enables us to have a per- fect artificial memory. This non-forgetting memory is created by information stored externally and information uploaded to the Internet every day. We outsource part of our memories to this digital variant and it is affecting us. As a digital designer I became intrigued by the inconspicuous influence certain every- day technologies have on us. Especially when I noticed that my English vocabulary seemed to have shrunk, which I traced back to a newfound Google Translate reliance. Therefore, I set out to investigate the results of technological development specifically on the subject of human memory. ‘Digital Hyperthymesia’ is a metaphor I created during my research to describe the phenomenon of the digitisation of the externalisation of human memory processes. It is de- rived from the condition Hyperthymesia: a rare neuropsychological condition characterised by a superior memory. The research resulted in a design product that aims to counter the mentioned influences. Additionally, it is meant to instigate debate on this subject. The Case In the paper ‘A Case of Unusual Autobiographical Remembering’ the 028 authors propose the name hyperthy- mestic syndrome or hyperthymesia, from the Greek word thymesis, meaning ‘remembering’ and hyper, meaning ‘more than normal’.1 They report the case of AJ, ‘a woman whose remembering dominates her life. Her memory is ‘non- 028•Interface of computer application Artificial Ignorance. 073 stop, uncontrollable, and automatic.’ AJ spends an excessive amount of time recalling her personal past with considerable accuracy and reliability.’2 People who suffer from hyperthymesia can recall almost every day of their lives nearly perfectly without conscious effort. Such a powerful memory seems like a great advantage. Extraordinary memory capacity is an admirable and desirable trait. Furthermore, the activity of forgetting has had a negative con- notation for centuries. However, the conclusions Parker, Cahill, and McGaugh reached on the case of AJ were that although ‘her recollections were highly […] accurate, and she obtained a perfect score on the Autobiographical Memory Test’ her superior memory surprisingly ‘does not necessar- ily facilitate other aspects of everyday life [...] and causes her to spend much of her time recollect- 1 By Elizabeth S. Parker, Larry Cahill and James L. McGaugh 2006. 2 Parker, Cahill, and McGaugh 2006: 35-49. ing the past instead of orienting to the present and the future.’ Also, ‘neuropsychological tests documented that AJ, while of average intelligence, has significant deficits in executive functions involving abstraction, self-generated organisation and mental control.’3 The human memory consists of a duality: the activities of remembering and forgetting. While forgetting has a negative connotation, it is actually a valuable and essential function of human memory, and it allows it to work efficiently. In the case of AJ, a deficiency in forgetting 029•Artificial Ignorance software. 073 resulted in dwelling on the past, not being able to orient on the present or future and having difficulty with conceptualising and exerting mental control. The constant, irrepressible stream of memories interrupts her everyday life, and has a destructive effect on her cognitive capac- ity. This strongly resembles the suggestion by Daniel Schacter that memory’s fallibility (‘sins’) should not be viewed as a flaw. Instead, ‘the seven sins reflect the operation otherwise adap- tive features of memory.’4 He argues that the ability to remember the gist of what happened is also one of the memory’s strengths. This is ‘fundamental to such abilities as categorisation and comprehension’, allowing us to generalise across and organise our experiences. ‘Noting that such generalisation “is central to our ability to act intelligently” and constitutes a foundation for cognitive development, McClelland contends that generalisation ‘is central to our ability to act intelligently.’5 6 Therefore this paper made me question if a contemporary society in the ‘information era’ is subject to the same consequences of living with a shortage of forgetting as AJ, the woman with superior autobiographical memory? How did this phenomenon arise and will this have a similar destructive effect on our cognitive capacity? Origin We all live with Digital Hyperthymesia, a condition that enables us to have a perfect memory. It has become culturally accepted that recalling memories does not require much effort. We can simply explore our online or offline databases of memories by entering a word to describe the memory next to a digital magnifying glass, or we can search the right memory using filters (date, name, tags). In this essay I focus on self-created information, not on information gathered by oth- 029 er parties. Why is it that we are not hesitant to outsource an increasing amount of our memory to a digital one? And, what consequences can be expected through this development? Technological Drivers The first, and possibly the most obvious, cause of our recently acquired dependency on digital memory is the technological development that has made digital memory possible and afforda- ble for everyone. In his book Delete, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger identifies four technological drivers that facilitate a shift in which remembering has become the norm and the exception: digitisation, cheap storage, easy retrieval, and global reach.7 8 Cultural Perspectives The technological drivers played an important role in the evolution of Digital Hyperthymesia, this together with a gradual shift in cultural views regarding memory seem to be at the heart of this phenomenon. The externalisation of human memory with a purpose of enhancing (collective) intel- ligence has been pursued throughout history. The invention of the alphabet, the activities of reading and writing, offered for the first time in human history the potential for learning one an- other’s thoughts and ideas without having to engage in a direct conversation, and, therefore, this information surpassed the boundaries of time and space. People could build on each other’s ideas across decades and centuries and create shared knowledge. We now have seemed to hit the fast-forward button, when we will we reach a critical point of externalising too much of our memory? Moreover, would we even notice if we had? Since it is technologically possible to almost save anything and everything, it seems that this is the main reason to store everything: simply because it can be done; recording for recording’s sake. This has 3 Parker, Cahill, and McGaugh 2006: 35-49. 7 Mayer-Schönberger 2009: 249. 4 Schacter 1999: 182-203. 8 These drivers are elaborately explained in my thesis (van Bree 5 Schacter 1999: 182-203. 2014). This essay focuses on the cultural motives. 6 McClelland 1995: 69-90. given rise to new movements like ‘lifeloggers’, which consist of people who wear small devices that automatically capture various different aspects their lives. These recordings can be replayed, enabling a total recall scenario where no memory van be forgotten. Not only does this give rise to the incorrect assumption that more information always leads to better quality decisions, it also affects the way we view human memory. Throughout history metaphors were used to explain human memory. These metaphors changed from biological interpretations of a ‘living and evolving organism of knowledge’ to a technical description using the latest terms for information storage technologies. From a ‘library’ or ‘filing cabinet’ to a ‘photographic memory’, and the most recently used metaphor: a ‘comput- er’. This is not a constructive perspective because it undermines the typical human elements of the functionality of memory. It has led to a misinterpretation of the concept of human memory, and this has created a negative connotation that still remains today; this is a conflation of mem- ory and storage. Most people see human memory as an untrustworthy, forgetful, adaptive thing, because it lacks the ability to preserve information indefinitely like computers do. This is all true, although instead of regarding the forgetfulness as a negative aspect it appears to be a valua- ble and necessary human activity. We should review the old, biological metaphors, relearn our premise regarding human memory and find new metaphors to communicate. For instance, Borges concludes in his story ‘Funes the Memorious’ that ‘to think is to forget’ and that, possibly, it is forgetting, not remembering, that is the essence of what makes us human. We now relate memory to vast amounts of exact storage, and because human memory does not have this capacity, we have come to value our own internal memory less than a digital memory. Our prevailing conception, living in the ‘Information Age’, is that computers are better at this, and therefore it is best to use as many external memory aids as possible. Our devaluation of our memory is in contrast with the value the ancient Greeks placed on memory. Then, memory was the core of culture, and every literate person was practiced in mnemonic techniques, the art of remembering was seen as the art of thinking. A theory by David Brooks called ‘the outsourced brain’ demonstrates the way society 030 now relates to human memory: I had thought that the magic of the information age was that it allowed us to know more, but then I realized … that it allows us to know less. It provides us with external cognitive servants – silicon memory systems, collaborative online filters, consumer preference algo- rithms and networked knowledge. We can burden these servants and liberate ourselves.9 This choice of words illustrates the shift from seeing the value in possessing information from memory to seeing it as a ‘burden’, one we should be ‘liberated’ from. It seems that besides val- uing our own memory less, the value of internal knowledge is also decreasing in our society.