It Googles the Mind
Human memory still boggles my mind, if I can say it that way. I remember from my University days working on projects like image recognition & computer vision. It seemed amazing to me that the function of human memory and computer memory were opposite extremes. If I give you twenty numbers to remember right now, you might be able to retain seven of them where a computer can store, recall, and process billions of records with ease. It is not even close. However, when it comes to recognizing a face, or a voice, we do it seemingly “without thinking” and this is very difficult for computers.
I remember an experience I had a few years ago. I was on a business trip heading to Europe and I had to stay overnight at London Heathrow and take my connecting flight the next morning. After I landed, I went through customs, picked up my bags and advanced toward ground transportation to find the courtesy bus for my hotel. It was late evening; I was tired and ready for bed. Then in the middle of the busy Heathrow crowd flowing toward the buses, my mind focuses on one seemingly random person off in the distance, headed away from me. All I could see was this person’s gate and relative height to those around him. A thought then pops in my mind which I immediately dismiss, “that looks like Derrick” (a colleague of mine). I dismiss it for good reason. I’m in a busy London airport with thousands of people – what are the chances? I’m from Canada and he works in the Netherlands. Plus he is too far away and I couldn’t possibly recognize him solely from his manner of walking. The thought wanders off.
I eventually find the right bus, get on, and of course I see my colleague sitting on the same bus going to the same hotel! So out of billions of people in the word, in a place where I would least expect it, my mind is able to recognize a person’s walking pattern that I was not looking for and alert me that I have seen this pattern before. Amazing.
Of course, as I write this, I can’t even recall which country I was heading to or who I was going to meet. I can, however, search my online calendar to recover that information. In fact a lot of my “memory” is now searchable online. As an experiment, try to remember where you were exactly three months ago on the evening of October 22, 2007. I was at a PRSA Technology Summit dinner in Philadelphia at the Cuba Libre Restaurant and Rum BarI. No, I did not answer that question from memory. I used search.
As we leave our digital breadcrumbs behind through our increasing use of online tools, we are finding that more and more of our “memories” are stored on servers. At one time our use of Google was limited to searching the web. Now we can use it to remember! I use Google Desktop for this all the time. Perhaps in the future there will be digital archaeologists doing “digital digs”, uncovering rare online media to piece together what happened in our time?! (I checked Wikipedia for digital archaeologist; it’s not there yet). And now with Social Media, we not only have the basic images and words stored, but we also have the conversational dynamics and the social graph. We can recreate who said it first, how it propagated, who made it popular, etc.
I wonder where else this will lead? It simply Googles the Mind.
January 23rd, 2008 - Posted in Online Media, Social Media | |
on January 24th, 2008 at 11:02 pm
Well written post, Marcel. I’ve often been amazed at the differences between how human minds and computer brains work. When you mention using tools to aid in memory, that prompted me to consider our growing dependency on the tools. My human memory seems to worsening as years go by. I’ve become dependent on digital memory aids and have neglected the skill of human memory, maybe like many others in our generation. Nonetheless, “human” memory is a very useful skill to possess in life situations, e.g. remembering a person’s name that you only met once before. The more and more we rely on gadgets, if one day our gadget runs out of battery power or can’t get online for some reason, if then our human memory “fails” us (possibly due to a neglect of this skill), we might be in trouble. Human memory (when it has been trained and exercised) is also still faster than accessing data on a gadget, since that requires physically glancing at your device and navigating to whatever information you’re looking for.
on January 28th, 2008 at 11:49 am
[…] my last post, “It Googles the Mind“, I talked about the digital breadcrumbs that we leave behind when we use social networks and […]
on January 28th, 2008 at 8:30 pm
I remember hearing once that Einstein never remembered his own phone number, but instead relied on a telephone book to find it. I guess he was even more of a pioneer than we thought.