On the changing nature of memory: what the brain forgets, technology will remember

Storage card manufacturing companies continue to push boundaries with their inventions, creating massive memory card space, in doing so, allowing users to store more of everything. Earlier this year, the SanDisk Corporation, a global leader in flash storage solutions, announced the release of the 128GB SanDisk Ultra microSDXC UHS-1 memory card, the world’s largest capacity microSD card. The card stores 16 hours of Full HD video, 7 500 songs, 3 200 photos and more than 125 apps, all on a single removable card.

Though the size of the microSD is impressive, and allows mobile phone and tablet users more storage space, it is highly unlikely that your average person would need so much storage space on the fly. What memory cards make possible, necessarily so, is the chance for users to be archivists, both of their own lives and that of others. It makes it possible to hold onto moments, to relive and share them many years later.

In Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel The Unconsoled, the blurb reads: “Ryder, a renowned pianist, arrives in a Central European city he cannot identify for a concert he cannot remember agreeing to give”. Human memory is inconsistent, but technology can help to retrieve it or at least trigger it when it fails us.

To retrieve Ryder’s memories, one could flash photographs of it to him or photographs of him in the Central European city. This is the same method that therapists and families use to trigger old memories and help wrestle patients from the hollow depths of amnesia, dementia and Alzheimer’s.

Technology has been supplementing human memory since the floppy disks became commercially available in 1971. The memory is not immediate, one has to initiate it, but technology helps to recall it when we need to retrieve or trigger old thoughts.

A few weeks ago, during a weekend of violent rains, a friend, left her laptop on a table, and when she got back, the rain had pierced through the roof and soaked her laptop. She was hysterical. “All those memories are gone” she said, “My son’s pictures are in there. How am I going to get them back?” The photos in the laptop take on a form different to the memory in her mind. She can look at them, agonise over every detail.

Alternatively, the memory in her head weakens every day. This is the cause of her hysteria, it is not that she does not remember what her son looks like but the laptop was the back up and now that it is gone, when her own memory fades into nothingness, the laptop will not be there to trigger it with.

Memory cards give this false impression of being entirely reliable, because a crash or viral infection will render it useless. However, technology makes up for those weaknesses by offering different devices and methods to store memories.

In 2011, Apple Inc launched iCloud, a cloud storage and cloud computing service. As of July 2013, the service had 320-million users. One of its advantages is that unlike tangible memory cards, it does not risk being soused in rain or crashing into the floor.

Dr Karim Nader, an associate professor in the department of psychology, at McGill University believes that the act of remembering can change our memories. Technology can help retrieve the details that with time fades. If one goes to visit a city, for example, and afterwards cannot remember what colour their hotel was, one can simply look at a photograph.

The convenience technology offers in retrieving a memory, argues Fairfield University psychologist Linda Henkel, makes people less inclined to remember the moment, so they can retrieve it later. “You’re just kind of mentally discounting it–thinking, ‘Well, the camera has it,'” Henkel told Co.Design.

The larger problem, says Henkel, occurs when people amass so many digital photographs that organising them becomes a prohibitive task. So not only is their memory for the moment impaired, but they’ve lost the ability to recover it, too.

“I think if people were more mindfully photographing things, if maybe they were making fewer photos with more choice and interaction with these things, that’s where you’d not see the photos impairing you,” she says in an interview with Fastcodesign. “And obviously looking at the photos afterward. Reminiscing about them–using them as a retrieval.”

Technology has an important role to play in how people store memories and how they retrieve them. A user can store photos, videos, documents, including reminders about events, essentially allowing technology to remember when they have forgotten. The balance, however needs to be struck, between how much do we in fact keep in our memories as humans. We cannot delegate all the responsibility of remembering to technology.