Free Total Recall: How the E-Memory Revolution Will Change Everything by C. Gordon Bell, Jim Gemmell

later, it uses that constellation as a scaffold for reconstructing the original experience. As the memory plays out in your mind you may have the strong impression that it’s a high-fidelity record, but only a few of its contents are truly accurate. The rest of it is like a bunch of props, backdrops, casting extras, and stock footage.
    When a friend tells you a five-minute-long humorous story, the memory you come away with isn’t the exact sequence of words he uttered. When you repeat the “same” story to your friends at work on Monday, what you actually do is reconstruct it in your own way according to the same pattern and meaning. You follow the overall map provided by those key junctures you memorized, but you freely embellish and fill in any gaps to make the story flow smoothly between them. You might repeat verbatim a few key bits of the original telling, but most of the word choices are yours. Generally, all I can remember of a joke is the great punch line that made me laugh, and I have to reinvent the rest in order to share it.
    And it gets even stranger. Sometimes a feature that was confabulated during one act of remembering gets reremembered during the next act. In the process, the confabulation can become a permanent element of the bio-memory. Here’s how the eminent neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux sees it:
Like many scientists in the field of memory, I used to think that a memory is something stored in the brain and then accessed when used. Then, in 2000, a researcher in my lab [convinced us] that our usual way of thinking was wrong. In a nutshell . . . each time a memory is used, it has to be restored as a new memory in order to be accessible later. The old memory is either not there or is inaccessible. In short, your memory about something is only as good as your last memory about it. This is why people who witness crimes testify about what they read in the paper rather than what they witnessed.
    False memories can have tragic consequences. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, thousands of families were ripped apart when adult children claimed that they had recovered long-repressed memories of sexual molestation when they were little. It turned out many of these “memories” had been coaxed into being by gullible, credulous therapists who hadn’t realized what they were doing.
    Most of our memories are not grossly altered as our brain repeatedly remembers them, but all of us harbor at least some memories that have been radically revised, and all of our memories are susceptible to gradual mutation and drift.
    That is about to change.

E-MEMORY TRANSFORMS BIO-MEMORY
    Biological memory is subjective, patchy, emotion-tinged, ego-filtered, impressionistic, and mutable. Digital memory is objective, dispassionate, prosaic, and unforgivingly accurate.
    In our brains, memory, attention, and emotion conspire to warp, compress, and edit time and life experience in many ways. A video camera, the eye of an e-memory, in contrast, never blinks or winces, never drifts into a daydream or does a double take. A camera will record an hour of pedestrian crosswalk traffic with the same fidelity as it will witness an hour of bloody genocide.
    E-memory will be the fact checker for those meanings, definitions, and concepts in our semantic memories. You probably already use Google or Wikipedia to look things like this up, when you can. But not everything you know is easy to find on the Web, or may not even be there. It will be there in your e-memory. And it will be easier to find, because you will be searching just your own memories, not the whole Web. I often find it is faster to use MyLifeBits to track down obscure facts I know I’ve been exposed to before but can’t recall directly, simply because I’ll often remember when or where or from whom I heard the thing I’m trying to recall.
    Everyone knows the anxiety and frustration of not being able to remember someone’s name. With MyLifeBits I often track down a name using clues