If I were to utilise the "mother's favourite" approach to reminders and tie a piece of string around a finger to remind myself of something I should be able to remember ten things, or I guess two if I were trying to remember anything about binary.
Frank Tuttle Randomly Addresses Memory
I remembered I had been thinking about memory the other day, although to be honest I can not recall why I had forgotten this. These days I certainly have enough memory saving devices around me that you would think it should be impossible to not remember something. Even at a base level, if I were to utilise the "mother's favourite" approach to reminders and tie a piece of string around a finger to remind myself of something I should be able to remember ten things, or I guess two if I were trying to remember anything about binary.
With that in mind, at this point I am prepared to make the statement that there are two fundamental types of devices that are now infused into our existence - those that act as our surrogate memories and those devices that remember things seemingly only for their own benefit. Part of this revelation came to me as I was involuntarily re-enacting a scene from "2001: A Space Odyssey" where I was playing the role of the ape and a stubborn remote control was playing the role of the bone. As you may have surmised, I would consider a remote control as one of those devices falling into the "thinking for their own benefit" category. If I were to put it another way, I might suggest that the remote control's primary function is to remember a set of commands that it can relay to another device when prompted. At the point in time when it ceases to remember how to do that, there is really no benefit to having the device. Shortly thereafter the device in question became a number of smaller devices, the only benefit collectively delivered being that of a mild and short lived sense of satisfaction.
Some consider it a sad fact that as we age our memory tends to become less agile or indeed less precise. That is certainly one perspective, however it totally overlooks the enormous benefit of recounting a story or anecdote and believing that you are 100% correct in your recollection. It would seem that some of the joy of this existential recollection process is being eroded by these surrogate memories that I think I mentioned earlier. These days I can not leave the house without any number of gigabytes of extra memory related to the many devices hanging off me that I am required to carry as part of my charter of being a "modern person".
As with hair styles, these surrogate memories of course come in a variety of shapes and sizes. In part I believe some of this could be to do with providing us modern persons with something else to remember - which stick goes in which slot and to what end. It is something like the question of the chicken or the egg. We all have only a certain amount of memory to go around. Some choose to use it to remember phone numbers of every house they have ever lived in. Some choose to use it to remember where they left their keys. Some choose to use it to remember to breathe while trying to remember what the middle initial in their name stands for. Be that as it may, we must consider that once we have filled our allotted space for remembering things, some things will be forgotten as other things get remembered and if some of those things we are trying to remember are which surrogate memory we have put something on there is going to be trouble. Now if I could just find a piece of string... ah, forget it.
Submitted by Frank on February 01, 2006.
