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

I do remember. I recently wanted to find the name of a fellow who nearly contributed to the Computer History Museum in 1983. I recalled the company he worked for. I thought he came to a lecture at the museum that same year. I wondered if his name was on the list of attendees, a copy of which I had kept in a box for years and then scanned. . . . Yes! In general, if I know that my e-memory has it, I will usually find it within a minute or two.
    E-memory will become vital to our episodic memory. As you live your life, your personal devices will capture whatever you decide to record. Bio-memories fade, vanish, merge, and mutate with time, but your digital memories are unchanging. And e-memories will contain an unprecedented level of detail. With my bio-memory, I struggle to recall exactly when I was in San Francisco last year. With my GPS logged, I can recall the exact time of my walking down each individual street in San Francisco.
    Total Recall will change how we think about our lives. It will also change how we feel about our lives.
    Consider just one photo that popped up on my screensaver while I worked on this book. I glanced at it and was transported back to my fourth birthday in 1938. Mother told me I could invite anyone I wanted to my party, and so I did. We were an eclectic bunch, all eighteen of us ranging in age from two to fourteen. I’m in the middle front with a large sheet cake on my lap. It’s obvious that I’ve got more important things on my mind than getting my picture taken, like sticking my pudgy fingers into the creamy frosting, which although white, hid a middle that was pure devil’s food.
    The faces in the picture spark recollections, like the really cute three-year-old girl from across the street, sitting in the front row with me. When my sister was born two years later, I picked the name Sharon, after that little girl, my first sweetheart, Sharon Lee. We were framed by my older teenage cousins, one with his hands in his pockets, looking ever so cool, while the other was praying for the photograph to be over. Glancing at each face, I was struck by one in particular. His name was Joe Bill, the minister’s son. He died a year later at the age of ten and it bothers me as much today as it did then.
    This single picture from 1938 initiates an avalanche of memories, each connected to the other, via associations established in my brain decades ago. They elicit feelings of pleasure and sadness. Each strand tugs on a dozen others, all of them connected into the vast web of memories that make me uniquely me.
    I recall a research demonstration at Microsoft headquarters of a huge grid of LCD monitors, three high and six wide, all filled with a time line displaying photos from my life. I stood transfixed for several minutes in front of this biographical vista, soaking in the perspectives and the details. Seeing so much of my life, all at once, was profoundly moving.
    E-memories will not be trapped back in cabinets and shoe boxes. They will be on our end tables and walls. They will follow us on our travels. They will keep us company, showing us friendly faces, letting us hear cherished voices. E-memory will be an intimate extension of bio-memory. And change it into something new.

RECALLING WHAT MATTERS
    I don’t know about you, but sometimes I’m absentminded. I forget where I put things. Sometimes, coming out of the airport terminal, I have a momentary flash of panic. Where did I park the car? Was it level one or two? I hate getting home from the grocery store, looking up at that burned-out lightbulb, and realizing that I forgot—again!—to buy a replacement.
    Once I left my notebook computer containing most of my e-memory on the security table at San Francisco International Airport. I dashed back, my heart racing dangerously, wondering if someone had walked off with a digital copy of my life. Thankfully, it was still there. Then I forgot the computer again at the Dulles Airport security, and didn’t