memories for life

Aaah Cool.

Cafuego - Thank you for helping me get the del.icio.us module working so it pulls the random links I store into my blog.  It's pulled up the last 10 - or a random selection - or something (ok I haven't figured that bit out yet) - and the last one was memories for life.

So I visited it again. It's really kinda fascinating. It led me to a paper published in the Journal of The Royal Society Interface in 2006 called "Memories for life: a review of the science and technology" and is also available as PDF.

"The interface between the physical world and the digital world seems to be blurring, and becoming less determinate (Abowd et al. 2002). It has long been recognized that the interaction between technology and human society can have far-reaching psychological effects (Ong 1982). Thinkers as early as Socrates and Plato focused on memory as one faculty of mind for which technologies of storage could change individuals' psychological makeup, by, so to speak, externalizing or 'outsourcing' mental function. In recent years, the development of such commonplace innovations as email, ubiquitous computing (including the Internet), virtual reality and advanced prosthetics have brought home the requirement for an increase in the scientific and social understanding of cognitive function, in order to design and evaluate appropriate technological devices."

Oooh errrr. This is pushing all my buttons.

This is human capacity for remembering... and digital capacity for storage. They touch on an element I've long found fascinating - that the first capacity diminishes when we grok and rely on the second to do it for us.  And on top of this - it's being framed as a computer science problem.

My pulse is racing.

/me reads on.

I'd forgotten about that website. ;)