---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Tanushree Jindal
Date: Thu, Nov 16, 2006 at 2:27 PM
Subject: Re: Aegis :: Ideas
About MyLifeBits and LifeLog
http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/110/head-for-detail.html
http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,58909-0.html
Picked up a few relevant lines from the first one. Both the projects are different, huge and maybe useless, but the issues of memory can be compared.
"It gives you kind of a feeling of cleanliness," Bell tells me. "I can offload my memory. I feel much freer about remembering something now. I've got this machine, this slave, that does it."
Personal-productivity guru David Allen also has long argued that the frailty of everyday memory is the primary source of stress for overburdened corporate types. We sit around anxious about our to-do lists because we can never entirely remember them (while we're at work) or entirely forget them (when we're not).
It gives his mind the chance, he says, to be more playful, to have more energy for creative thinking. But it is also a double-edged sword. Bell suspects MyLifeBits might be slowly degrading his real, carbon-based brain's ability to remember clearly. When you have an outboard mind doing the scut work, you tend to get out of practice.
I'm a big fan of forgetting," says Frank Nack, a German computer scientist who published a critique of lifelogging experiments last winter. "It's how we make sense of life, how we interpret things. Everybody is building a life story; we all need to forget certain stages. I don't want to be reminded of everything I said." Forgetting, he points out, is key to cultural concepts like forgiveness and nostalgia. Sure, we lose track of most of what happens to us--but that natural filtering process results in what we call knowledge and wisdom. When memories are only a click away, Nack says, they're cheapened.
Pictures
Yet here's the problem with the pictures: They pose an even bigger search dilemma, because computers can't "see" the contents of a photo.
So are all those photos a waste of memory? Or can that kind of exhaustive visual record actually be worth something?
You actually remember things you'd already forgotten," Smeaton says. "You'd see somebody you met in a corridor and had a two-minute conversation with that you'd completely forgotten about. And you'd go, 'Oh, I forgot to send an email to that guy!' It's bizarre. It improves your recall by 100%."
In fact, "refresher" imagery is so powerful that it seems to help restore recall in people who have very little memory, or none at all.
From: Tanushree Jindal
Date: Thu, Nov 16, 2006 at 2:27 PM
Subject: Re: Aegis :: Ideas
About MyLifeBits and LifeLog
http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/110/head-for-detail.html
http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,58909-0.html
Picked up a few relevant lines from the first one. Both the projects are different, huge and maybe useless, but the issues of memory can be compared.
"It gives you kind of a feeling of cleanliness," Bell tells me. "I can offload my memory. I feel much freer about remembering something now. I've got this machine, this slave, that does it."
Personal-productivity guru David Allen also has long argued that the frailty of everyday memory is the primary source of stress for overburdened corporate types. We sit around anxious about our to-do lists because we can never entirely remember them (while we're at work) or entirely forget them (when we're not).
It gives his mind the chance, he says, to be more playful, to have more energy for creative thinking. But it is also a double-edged sword. Bell suspects MyLifeBits might be slowly degrading his real, carbon-based brain's ability to remember clearly. When you have an outboard mind doing the scut work, you tend to get out of practice.
I'm a big fan of forgetting," says Frank Nack, a German computer scientist who published a critique of lifelogging experiments last winter. "It's how we make sense of life, how we interpret things. Everybody is building a life story; we all need to forget certain stages. I don't want to be reminded of everything I said." Forgetting, he points out, is key to cultural concepts like forgiveness and nostalgia. Sure, we lose track of most of what happens to us--but that natural filtering process results in what we call knowledge and wisdom. When memories are only a click away, Nack says, they're cheapened.
Pictures
Yet here's the problem with the pictures: They pose an even bigger search dilemma, because computers can't "see" the contents of a photo.
So are all those photos a waste of memory? Or can that kind of exhaustive visual record actually be worth something?
You actually remember things you'd already forgotten," Smeaton says. "You'd see somebody you met in a corridor and had a two-minute conversation with that you'd completely forgotten about. And you'd go, 'Oh, I forgot to send an email to that guy!' It's bizarre. It improves your recall by 100%."
In fact, "refresher" imagery is so powerful that it seems to help restore recall in people who have very little memory, or none at all.
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