April 1, 2014 • 40 mins
Outsourcing Memory: From digital photography to Internet spellcheckers, we allocate more and more of our cognitive processes to the cloud. But what do we ultimately gain from all of this - and what do we lose? Find out in this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey you wasn't the stuff to Blow
your mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas. Julie.
We live in a remarkable age, don't we. We certainly do.
We certainly do. We have um airplanes, true submarines, we
(00:25):
have satellites in orbit, and we have these amazing little
devices that we wear on our person at all times
that often feel like, uh, an extension of ourselves, and
we turn to them when we need to connect with somebody,
when we need to take a photograph of something happening
in our daily life, if we need to fact check something,
(00:47):
be it you know who starred in Beast Master? Or
I wonder what the name of this friend of a
friend is. What do you do you on Facebook and
you look for it, or you just need like simple um,
you know, conversions of figures or simple mathematics. What do
you do? You go fleeing to your your smart device?
Oh oh yes, yes, yes, well it is it is
(01:09):
the rolodex as well. It's all those things rolled up
into one and this little, uh, this little electronic organ
that lives in our pocket. I know. And the funny
thing about that is that this question I'm about to
post would be ridiculous ten years ago, but now I
think it matters. Have you ever tried to recall an
actual phone number stored in your cell phone? I'm talking
(01:31):
about a phone number of a close friend or a relative,
and you've come up just with snake eyes. Yes, but
and it was trying. There were times, not recently, but
like in the first two or three years. Maybe. UM,
I do remember having that problem where I need to
list my wife's number on something or call her from
(01:53):
from another phone. And I we weren't married at the time,
but still if she was the person I was talking
to the most on the phone, and I didn't have
her number memorized yet, so I had to make a
conscious decision, Okay, this is this is the one number,
This is the the only one, but this is the
one number I need to commit to memory besides my own. See,
this is a fine example of us humans outsourcing memory
(02:15):
to metal and plastic, and it's something that we've been
doing for a long time. But now I think it's
very obvious because, as you say this, these devices are
things that we rely on all the time. Yea. And
not just the devices, of course, but just the Internet itself.
I mean, as as writers, we've certainly seen this trend
over the years where it's I'm forgetting how to spell
(02:38):
things because the spell check is so ubiquitous, it's everywhere,
it's and you know, and and if it's not in
the program that I'm using, then it's then it's it
halts me, it brings me to a stop. I can't
finish the sentence because I suddenly have all these doubts
about the things that I've written. It's like, sometimes I
find myself in a form intentionally misspelling a word in
(02:58):
order to make sure that the word I just spelled
was actually correct and not uh and not you know,
it was in a situation where that the spell check
was somehow turned off or malfunctioning. And that's such a
good example of a microcosm of how you are taking
memory and just shuttling off to someone else or something.
And I think a good macrocosm of this would be
something like the cloud, which we are now all beginning
(03:20):
to back up to right right, your your photos, your
your basic information on your phone, important documents. Uh. I
still occasionally run across old floppy disks that I that
with labels on them where I had like worked on
a short story or part of a novel or something,
you know, fifteen years ago. And at the time I
(03:40):
was like, all right, this, this is important. I mean
to put this on the ZIP file and I'm gonna
store this in a different location it doesn't safe or something.
And now it's becoming increasingbly, you know, it just seems
silly because it's out there in the cloud. It's it's
stored safely, and you know, unknown storage facilities, electronic storage
facilities around the world. Well see, And I think this
all points to this idea that we are now at
(04:01):
the age of Watson. And when I'm talking about Watson,
I am talking about Jeopardy, of course, because this used
to be the game show in which humans would roll
out their memory prowess and show everybody how awesome we
were in that department. But along came, of course, an
artificial machine and and trumped Ken Jennings. Of course, this
is the the Jeopardy champ and map enthusiasts math yes,
(04:26):
and showed us how fallible our memories really are and
how we really do rely on outsourcing it and if
you're like me, you sat there thinking about all this
outsourcing of memory and you kind of shame yourself a
little bit because you think, well, you know, maybe I
should be making an effort to memorize these facts for
those who retain this information. But then on the other hand,
(04:47):
it makes a certain amount of economic sense, right, I mean,
our minds are in this universe having to navigate this
world of of physical objects, and in non physical idea
is abstract numbers, and it makes sense that like a
sly mold, we would figure out the shortest path through
the maze. And I like this idea of couching it
(05:10):
in slime mold because if you think about memory, it
kind of does have its place an emergence, right, and
this idea of all of us coming together as one
organism and making life work for us, and in this
case memory. So this is actually called transactive memory, and
it has been around since the dawn of man and woman,
(05:31):
right yeah, Because I mean if you are thinking about
early man trying to start a fire or trying to
create a stew, well, it's very possible that several people
know the steps in order to create this fire or
to create this this meal, and so everybody is relying
on each other to try to figure out how to
(05:52):
bring all of this to fruition. Right, So, you know,
think about the most complex do in the world, and
maybe it has fifty steps to it. Well, those fifty
steps are distributed among many people who don't have a
writing utensil or the internet at their disposal to try
to figure out how to do something. And this is, uh,
it's important to know. This is before the age of
(06:12):
specialization really takes off in a larger sense in the civilization.
You know, the idea that once you have a circles
of food, you don't have to hunt all the time,
and certain individuals can devote themselves to certain specialized tasks.
But it's what but, as we're discussing here, even before that,
there's a certain amount of specialization that ends up taking
place because we are externalizing the necessary information. We're essentially
(06:36):
outsourcing it to other members of our community. Now. Harvard
psychologist Daniel Witner, Ralph Eber, and Paula Raymond began to
study transactive memory in earnest in the eighties and they
found this is interesting in terms of specialization, that spouses
often divide up memory tasks. Yes, and this is really
the most um, this is the the example of this
(06:59):
is really I think the easiest for most of us
to understand because they also applied to not only two spouses,
but also to like close flint friends or or or
people that you're working with an a regular basis. So,
for instance, some of the stuff we're talking about here,
I recognize in our work process. You know. Uh, because
it comes down to to this, all right, you imagine
you're you and your coworker, you and your spouse. There's
(07:21):
certain information you need easy access to. Now at a
at a very economic level, think about it. Does it
make sense for you both to have that? You know,
if you need one bottle of water on a hike,
would you both carry a bottle of water? No, one
person would carry the bottle of the water of water
and the other person would say carry the cooler of sandwiches.
And with information with memory, it often ends up the
(07:43):
same way, and we end up at like, at a
subconscious level, we're doing this. You're not you know, you're
not actively thinking, well, my wife she's keeping track of
you know of of you know when we have to
go out of town. Uh, this weekend and what time
we need to leave or whatever. So I'll just let
her handle that, not because I would choose to forget that,
I would rather fill my brain with other things. No,
we we end up doing this at a sub conscious level,
(08:05):
just again, like that slime mold reaching out through the
maze to find the shortest way out. I know, I
was thinking about it in my own relationship with my spouse,
and I thought, well, he is the person who keeps
all the dates in his head as well as like
details about my personal family history as well as his,
because he's kind of he's the big memory there. But
I'm the person who does all the technology stuff. I
(08:27):
remember all the pasthwords, I remember all the steps to
switch between streaming and DVD and UM DVR and all
the different things that have to do with our internet
media consumption. And we've never talked about it and said, hey,
this is how we're gonna parse out our life together.
But that's just sort of how it has fallen to us.
So I think it's very interesting that we would shuttle
(08:49):
off certain things with people and go to them and say, okay,
how do you do this now? Of course, it's it's
important to mention in all this that the human memory
is is always flawed. I mean we've talked about this before.
Our memory of things that happened to us is flawed.
Every time we take that memory out of the drawer,
we alter it in some way, shape or form. And
when it comes to various factoids and specific details, uh,
(09:12):
that is another area where we just have built in limitations.
But this is where having a brainmate comes from play,
be it a spouse or just you know, a long
term uh, you know, co worker or friend. There was
a study we're looking at here from Cilia B. Harris
at All titled Collaborative Remembering When can remembering what others
be beneficial? And in this particular study, the researchers looked
(09:35):
at older couples who have been together for decades. Uh.
They separated them questioned individually about events years and years ago,
and uh, they stumbled on in details about past events
when they but when they question question them together, they
were able to retrieve even more information. And they they
observed that the the individuals were engaging in something called
(09:56):
cross queuing. So they're costing these clues back and forth
until they trigger enough memories in each other to recall
the total event. So it's like this collective memorization of
a past event, but they have to be together to
bring it out. It's like the wonder Twins powers activity.
That's so funny. I'm sure everybody has had that experience
before with someone. Now. Another example of creating a little
(10:22):
hold for our memory is a very interesting one to me,
and it has to do with photographs, because to me,
this is a very subconscious thing. You take a photograph, right,
and you think, I'm I'm on vacation, I've had this
wonderful moment, and I am remembering all of this, I'm
soaking it in. But that may not be the case.
We're of course talking about the photo taking impairment effect.
(10:43):
And uh, I think we've all encountered people at events,
strangers generally, who are taking photographs, and we've we've we've
met this with varying degrees of irritation or resentment. You know,
you're you're saying you're the Grand Canyon, and you're like,
I'm just I just want to take the sin, I
just want to experience it. And then there's here's somebody
(11:03):
that is, uh, you know, painstakingly setting up a camera
to take a photograph of it, and at times you
can be a little judge. You can think like, oh, well,
look at me, I'm living in the moment of this experience.
I'm experiencing it. A photograph can't even capture what I'm
seeing now, and you're looking at it through a camera
or growing up, I certainly remember seeing parents obsessed with
video cameras where it seems like they're observing their entire
(11:26):
the entire childhood of their offspring through the lens of
the video camera. Um also, and of course concerts are
even worse now. I was. I was a concert about
a year ago, like a heavy metal concert for this
band called Sugar, and the Sugar has been around for
a while, so you saw this differ. I think I
think there's some relation. It's to the aid issue, but
(11:49):
the other from Scandinavia, but they've been Yeah, they've been
around for a while and so they're they're fan base,
you know, ranges from you know people. I'm probably around
the middle of the the the the age of brackets
for the fans. So me and a friend of mine
were watching the show, but we couldn't help but notice
some of the younger fans who were basically experiencing the
(12:11):
live music through their their iPhones as they videotaped it,
and and we, you know, we were just like, this
is the most unmetal thing we've ever seen in their lives.
You know, you should be experiencing hell. So it's it's
easy to bring this this attitude into it. But then
you talk to somebody for whom photography is their passion,
is there is you know, even their you know their career,
(12:33):
and you know you you you have to admit that
this is the way that they take the beauty in
their life and and remember it, you know, well in
those cases. And we'll talk in a second about this study.
That sort of I think vindicates your feelings about being
at the Grand Canyon and someone looking at it through
a lens as opposed to experiencing it um In some ways,
(12:54):
I think the photographer might be able to have a
the professional photographer might have a better sense of those
events because they go through those images and they do
a lot of editing afterward, as opposed to someone who's
just happening happens to take a picture of that and
they put on Instagram at that moment. What it's also
something to be said, maybe I'm being judgy, but taking
a bad picture something and taking a good picture. For instance,
(13:15):
when I go to the aquarium and I see somebody
take a flash a direct flash image of something in
an aquarium tank, like they're not going to get a
good picture, Like like, it's not like you're gonna go
home and be and and you're gonna look at the
image that you took and it's just gonna you know,
time travel you back to when you were staring at
that octopus. No, you took a really bad photo of
something that was far more impressive in real life, whereas
(13:37):
you know, there are if someone actually knows what they're
doing in the camera there and with especially if the
appropriate editing is applied, you can create a more beautiful
vision of what you actually saw. I think that you
should create a pamphlet to give out at these various
places like the aquarium, just to do your duty here
as a little p s A. I have thought before
(13:59):
that I amost want to see a sign that's as
professional of photographers only. Um, I mean really that's kind
of when there's no photography allow That's basically what the
arrangement is like. If you want to photograph these works
of art, for instance, for fish, then you need to
know what you're doing. You need to get special permission
to do it. You want a giant thumb and the
kind of a world class work. Oh well, you know
(14:19):
that's the other thing. Like I when I go to
an art museum and uh, And I've been accused of
being a stump about about going to our museums before,
about not wanting to hear a bunch of people talk
at etcetera. And I and I want to clarify that
I do think it's okay to talk in a museum.
But when I'm trying to look at works of art
and people are busy getting their photograph made in front
of it, like that just drives me crazy, Like like
(14:41):
that the art, the art is the art we are,
you know, we should be here to appreciate the art,
not to say this is great. I love this painting.
It would be a little better for my memory that
I had a picture of me with it making the
victory sign with my fingers. All right, Remind me never
to attend the aquarium or a museum with you, because
I do like the photo bomb every once in a while.
So just saying, all right, we're talking about here is
(15:04):
Fairfield Universities psychologists Linda Hankel, who gave test participants a
digital camera in an itinerary of objects to view at
a museum on campus. There. Yeah, they said, go to
the museum, look at these particular exhibits. And some of
them were told, all right, take photographs of the whole thing,
you know, this particular painting, whatever. Just get a good
picture of this painting for me. Other people were told,
(15:25):
get some details, get the details of this paint They
were asked specifically to zoom in on the detail, okay,
and that's really important. And other people were just sent
to look at stuff exactly right, right, and not take
any photographs whatsoever. So the next day she showed them
pictures of the names of the objects they had seen,
or excuse me that she shown them pictures or the
names of the objects they had seen, and some they
(15:46):
hadn't seen at all, and she asked details about the
once they remembered. Now, test participants recognized fewer objects they'd
photographed whole right than those that they observed on their
museum tour, and they were much less accurate and recalling
visual details of museum objects they've photographed hole compared with
those that only observed unless they zoomed in with their camera.
(16:10):
So just the act of taking the picture allowed them
to use transactive memory, essentially saying I don't need to
remember this, this is getting documented, so I don't have
to crab my brain with us unless again they did
the whole zoom function, which changed, uh, their their mindset. Really,
it would change their cognitive function at that moment because
they had to hone in and really observe at that moment.
(16:32):
So you see how subconsciously we're doing this with photograph
and you have to wonder, what about the Internet? What
is that doing to the way that we uh shuttle
off memory. Yeah, that's essentially the big point we're getting
to here, especially concerning transactive memory. Again, that idea that
we're we're saying, all right, well, Judy knows how to
make this portion of the stew so I'm going to
(16:52):
uh and it is all subconscious. I'm going to forget
how to do that because I know that someone else
in my group is already specializing in that. That is
how we end up treating the Internet, That's how we
treat the cloud, not as a reference book that we
have at our disposal, but as a person, as as
if this is a member of our community who just
happens to say, remember all the fahrenheit celsius conversion tables?
(17:16):
Who who happens to remember who was in every movie ever?
Who happens to remember you know, even a little stuff
like what days to certain holidays fallen this year? I mean,
all the all of that information. They are this uber friend,
this friend made out of out of the internet. And uh,
and we treat that, we treat the cloud as if
it is this person and at least in our mind. Yeah,
(17:37):
And so the question becomes, how does this transactive memory
writ large affect our brain? And I'm sure everybody uh
is familiar with that by now famous two thousand and
eleven study about how Google has affected our memory and
has changed it in a sense um. The paper two
thousand eleven paper called Google Effects on Memory Cognitive consequences
(18:00):
of having information at our fingertips details research carried out
in four memory studies, and it was found in just
a general overview. It was found that if participants thought
that the information they were presented with was being backed up,
they were less likely to remember it. In addition, they
had this, uh, this one experiment involving difficult trivia questions,
(18:20):
and participants were more likely to subsequently quickly react to
words like Google and Yahoo. It was two thousand and eleven,
then the non computer related Nike in your play. So
the idea is that when we were asked about things
we don't know, our first instinct now is to think
about finding the information online. And I'm sure everybody's experienced
(18:42):
that too. I know that, you know, at least ten
times a day, I'll be thinking about something and I
and it's very actually very um disturbing to my process
if I'm trying to get something done in one large chunk,
because my room will will sort of say, okay, go
let's stop what you're doing right now and go look
that up. And it will be silly stuff too, like
I'll be researching something to do with, say, I don't
(19:04):
know quantum physics, and then I'll suddenly need to know
if a vagota is still alive or I want our
or the other day it was this, I suddenly had
to know what Mitch McConnell looked like when he was younger,
and incidentally I could find no evidence of what he
looked like when he was younger, Like the the earliest
image I found a Minch McConnell. He was he already
(19:24):
looked like he was in his fifties. So um, if
anyone out there can can que me into what he
looked like, it's stupid, it makes no sense. But for
some reason, my mind has to know what he looked
like when he was a younger man for no reason, Like,
I'm not obsessed with mint McConnell in any way shape
or form in a negative repositive. And it's funny. I
was looking at a paper on mirror neurons, and all
(19:44):
of a sudden I had the urge or this thing
bubble up in my brain of was Barbarella supposed to
be a scientist? And I was like, no, don't stop
what you're doing right now to look that up. Please don't.
But then you have to you have to run off
and uh and hopefully you'll find an answer. I'll get
thirty minutes just going down the rabbit hole. Well, you
(20:05):
know how it is that when we talk about memory
loop and like closing it, you know that that that
is going to continually pop up for me until I
go on Google what Barbara Ella's profession was. Yeah, I
mean I've I've seen the movie several times and I
can't remember off hands, so I think she was so listeners,
let us know Barbara Ella. What was her occupation? Mitch McConnell,
(20:25):
what do you do look like when he's a teenager?
All right, we should probably take a quick break and
when we get back, we are going to talk about
outsourcing your identity. Alright, we're back. What is your favorite
scene in Barbaralla? Well, there's so there's so much. I mean,
(20:47):
the thirteen year old boy and me still likes the
opening credits when she's floating around. But then there's the
weird stuff with the dolls attacking and the ice. There's
the queen with the horn coming out of her head,
the leather peep bowl, the angel dude, the orgasm machine.
I mean, it's just NonStop. Yeah, I think it's the
dolls with the razor sharp teeth that might be my favorite,
(21:10):
but you're right, it's hard to pick. All right. Um.
In the past, we have talked about something called the Panopticon,
and we talked about how when it comes to data
data tracking, UM, we have willingly handed ourselves over to
the pan panopticon that that I in the corporate sky
that tags every move we make on the Internet. That's right,
(21:30):
I mean cookies signaling where we've been. Uh. You know,
you're logging into into Facebook to view various accounts, various
news organizations, etcetera. So companies like Facebook ended up having
this rather remarkable picture of who and what you are,
just based on little individual bits about your interest. Because
not only do they know, well, here she is interested
(21:52):
in this, then they know well, if he or she
is interested in this, and they likely line up with
certain demographics surrounding that fan base. And it gets very analytical.
But in a sense, Facebook ends up knowing you better
than you know yourself. Yeah, and we'll get to some
of those uh analytics and how robust they are and
how they can predict what you're going to do and
who you may be about. But first I wanted to
(22:14):
share this tidbit from Slate magazine. It's an article by
Ed Finn, and he says, these days, when a computer
crunches the numbers and tells you this is who you are,
it's hard to contradict because there's more data about you
in the machine than there is in your head. Algorithms
are most effective at curating the information that's hardest for
us to hold in our heads. How long we talked
to mom, or what day of the week we've splurge
(22:36):
on an extra cookie? And I thought, yeah, that that
is right. There's a kind of a data read out
of yourself. It doesn't mean that's you necessarily, but it
might give you a clearer picture of the ways that
you behave at least the way that you're manifesting. I
guess now. One of the most extreme examples of the
predictive power of analytics, I think it is a Facebook example,
(22:58):
and it's from a user name that who detailed on
BuzzFeed how Facebook sorted out his sexual identity before anyone
else did. Right he uh. He He ended up seeing
an ad for for a for an article and it
was about coming out as gay. Yes, it was like
how to come out as gay or something to that effect, like,
so you've decided to come out, and here are the
(23:18):
events that led up to that. Because he was mortified
by this, because he thought, what is going on is
Facebook looking at my text messages on my iPhone? Because
the night before he had received that advertisement, he had
texted a friend for some advice on how to come
out to his parents. Yeah, because if anyone's not aware,
like this is still this is a huge deal in
an individual's life when they when they come out, even
(23:41):
just you know, partially to people in their surroundings about
their sexual identity. Right, this is very sensitive information. And
he wanted to try to get to the the end
of this and figure out how Facebook has served him
up such a an on target advertisement. Now it seems
like it's probably just coincidence, but he went for to
all of his activity on Facebook and everything that he
(24:03):
had ever liked or identified with had nothing to do
with being gay. And the only thing that might have
given Facebook a clue is that he made a comment
on a friend's link um and that the friends link
was Ohio Senator Rob Portman announced his support for marriage equality,
and his comment was just saying that nothing is cut
(24:25):
and dried, that's all. And most likely those algorithms, again
are pretty robust enough to have delivered him an advertisement
about sexuality and coming out. So, I mean, for some people,
obviously it's going to raise questions about you know why
he had just texted the night before and then received
(24:46):
the advertisement, but most likely again this just had to
do on that that one comment that he made, because
we're putting so much of ourselves out there into the
cloud that you know, we're building this kind of reflection
of who and what we are. Yeah, there's a there's
a fabulous episode of Charlie Brooker's Black Mirror that that
that utilizes this, where an individual dies passes away, and
(25:10):
that individual happen to be a heavy social media user
and this takes place in a fictional near future. But
after this happens, there's a service that allows uh that
allows you to communicate with sort of a reassembly of
that persona based on the information that they have placed online.
So essentially using the aga the algorithmic understanding of a
departed loved one to rebuild them in the digital world,
(25:34):
which we've talked about before. I just wonder if you
try to create your own image of yourself algorithmically how
and then sort of communicate with that person or that
being or that information, how close would that be to
who you feel you actually are? Yeah, well, there it
seems like you get into that whole issue about is
there a single unified me? You know, because I'm different.
(25:57):
I'm a different person inside, I'm a different person with
different people. We have mentioned this before, but it probably
bears mentioning again that web surfing habits may be able
to predict depression. You now, this is a two and
twelve study from Missouri University of Science and Technology. We're
talking about depression screening questionnaire that was administered to two
(26:20):
d and sixteen students. Thirty percent um were identified as
having perhaps depression. And what they did is they gained
access to that thirty percent of their internet usage, of
course with their permission. And what they found is that
depressed students tended to email an instant message more frequently,
and we're more likely to download videos or songs and
(26:42):
play more online games than those who weren't depressed. Of course,
I kind of take issue with that because sometimes I
think it's a matter of how much time you have
on your hands, and we are talking about students. Yeah, yeah,
it's true, and you know, it's also worth saying. And
it's also which which comes first, right, is their situations
where if one has a lot of free time on
(27:02):
their hands, maybe they're a little more prone to depression,
or maybe if something happens in one's life. That is,
you know, that might lead to depression. It may also
lead to a little more extra time, so you lose
your job. So I mean it's hard to really to
track it and pin it down to sus up. And
then what do you make of people who are life bloggers? Right?
People who are doing this on purpose. They're taking as
(27:25):
much data as they can and trying to make a
story of themselves about it intentionally, right, And we're talking
about like people who produce annual reports of their activity
as obsessively logged throughout the year, you know, which which
again kind of comes back to that idea of people
with photographic memories as as ultimately suffering from a severe
(27:45):
self obsession. And that's where all of this comes from.
This is a kind of the externalation of that using
various uh, you know, either record keeping devices or outright
social media devices to to just keep very precise records
of what's going on and externalizing all of their memory. Well,
and that's where this idea of the future of outsourcing
(28:07):
memory comes into play, because if just even ten years ago,
we weren't that dependent on our our smart devices, our smartphones,
what is the next ten years gonna look like when
you have something like Google glass amassing data in an
intentional way, right, I mean we're talking about video, we're
talking about photographs, um, and we're talking about uploading all
(28:29):
of that to the cloud. Yeah, I mean because these
photographs we take especially, I mean, they're they're they mean
a lot to us. You know, we're taking pictures of
our children, We're taking pictures of the places we go,
and like some of these end up being like the
last photographs of people before they die. You know, these
are these are essential things. And then for that to
to say suddenly vanished because you're you know, your phone
(28:51):
was lost or your account was hacked, like that could
be heartbreaking, right. So you know, you have things like Memoir,
which is an app that will sink and store photos
from your phone and your computer in the cloud, which
makes sense, right because you have all this stuff, what
do you do with it? And it organizes it all
by date and then pulls in data. This is the
interesting thing from social networks like Facebook, Instagram in four
(29:13):
square to provide more social context. So the idea here
that the co founder Lee Hoffman is trying to hone
in on is that he can create they can create
something like a memory, a real memory, because we know
a memory isn't just like a one thing. We know
it's connected to all sorts of stuff, probably things that
we can't even you know, quantify quite yet, but we
(29:35):
know that a memory has to do with smell and
taste and what you see at the time and what
you feel at the time is just pegged all these
different associations. Yes, and it's and and you can forget it,
and you can also you alter it every time you
you look at it, and it can be flawed for
a number of reasons. But what we're talking about here
is there the recording of saying, you know, actual image
of what happened, or an actual audio of what happened,
or a GPS tag of exactly where you were at
(29:57):
a given time. So memory in a sense becomes more
more exact. And oddly enough this factors and do another
episode of Black Mirror, The Entire History of You, which
came out in two thousand and eleven, UH and Black Mirror,
by the way, excellent series, but only for our mature
audience members out there, because it deals with some some
some pretty dark, bleak UH subject matter, and this particular episode,
(30:21):
the entire history of you. All of the individuals in it,
at least those who can afford it, have this thing
called a grain implanted. It's like a brain implant, and
it basically takes anything they see is recorded, like all
just the videotape of their entire life is seen through
their eyes, is recorded and then can be recalled later,
can be inspected, say at the airport before you board
(30:44):
a plane, they want to see your you know, your
flash through your last forty eight hours to make sure
you're not up to any any mischief. And another like
and basically the whole episode explores some of the various complications,
uh and traumas that can occur when you have that
kind of you call it, you're disposed. You know, that's
really interesting because I was just thinking about this other
device is called me Meadow, and it's a wearable camera
(31:06):
and it takes um five megapixel pictures every thirty seconds. Yeah,
it's like that kind of thing. Yeah, in two thou
eleven it was science fiction, near future science fiction, but
now we're already seeing the stuff rollout. And then you
have something called life Logger, which is actually another device
that will document your life for you sort it, upload it,
contextualize it. And I was thinking about this movie called
(31:29):
Until the End of the World. I think it came
out in the eighties but I can't remember. Um but
in it. The reason I bring it up is because
it's this post apocalyptic world and people have access to
their memories just like a film on these devices which
kind of looks like iPads now um or mini air iPads. Uh.
But anyway, they become completely obsessed in hamstrung in their
(31:52):
efforts to even kind of move forward in this life
because they just keep going over this information of excessively
of how their lives used to be. Yeah, I mean
it instantly brings to mind, you know, very very Buddhist
ideas of of peace. You know about how if you
if you were shackled to the past or shackle to
the future, then you're not really experiencing any amount of freedom.
(32:15):
You know, you're not living in the in the moment
at all. And it's it's important that we forget things,
you know. It's easy, it's easy to to discount that
and you know say, oh, I wish I remember this,
or I musha remembered that. And I was just thinking,
you know, we're talking about photographs. So, like, imagine a
time not too long ago where you had a loved
one die and and you know, if you didn't have
access to you know, paintings or drawings or whatever, you
(32:38):
could easily forget that person's face in a matter of time.
You know it would you would, or at least you
would you reach that point where we would doubt your
own memory of their face. And that's that's kind of
powerful to think about. But on the other hand, we
need to be able to forget things like painful memories
need to dull over time, Like time doesn't heal all wounds,
but it does feel some wounds, and we need those
wounds to heal well. If you have a memory that's
(32:58):
particularly special to you, the ability to dwell upon it
and obsess on it, does it become trite? Then it
becomes so well known and so well trod territory that
it becomes kind of dull to you. Yeah, potentially. Yeah, alright.
So the next thing we're gonna talk about before we
wrap things up here about outsourcing memory is something called
(33:19):
a neuroprosthesis, and I kind of want one of these.
It's not available for humans yet, but I see advantages here.
There's a team at wake Force University headed up by
Sam dead Wilder and by the way, funded this research
was funded by DARPA, and they created this neuropros thesis
(33:39):
that promotes task specific neural firing. So what they're talking
about is of course racist macaques, right, and which is
a huge step by the way that they're using these
primates as supposed to rats, which they're doing they've been
doing for years, um. But they take an array of
electrodes and they implant them into the hippocamp us of
(34:00):
the monkeys and they're able to both record neural activity
and stimulate it. And then using a mathematical model called
MEMO m I m O, the researchers determined the pattern
of activity that was seen when each animal correctly performed
each type of trial, which is called a strong code,
and then when they failed, which is called a weak code.
(34:22):
Now that the end all being of this thing is
that they were able to go in and manipulate the
strong code when they were going back to do this
specific task and then bolster the brain's memory the response
of what to do next, that is the correct thing
to do next. That is crazy, it's essentially an electronic
(34:43):
brain enhancer. Yes, and doesn't that kind of I mean
for certain tasks that seems like it might be kind
of lovely, right, I mean of assuming you can turn
it off, turn it on. But then some people might say, well,
why would you ever turn it off? And and to
what extent does it become like uh, you know, the
the issue of say, at all prescriptions in in in school.
(35:04):
You know, you might become addicted. Like you we were
like I don't know how to think without this thing exactly,
or I think I essentially they all look around you
a bit about electronic brain enhancers. Eat, so they show
somebody with that's addicted to electronic brain enhancers and they're
just like sweating in a room and they have like
several these little electroids attached to their their head. But yeah,
but you get into issues like is it fair that
(35:25):
some people have have have these things and some people don't,
and then there are some people too dependent upon them. Uh,
it gets our cybernetic future is is weird? Well, does
that take away the sense of free will to write?
Because narrative is something we shape and we decide how
we're going to report the facts and and think about things,
and if it's there, if there are a set of
algorithms doing that for us, maybe then we don't really
(35:48):
have the free will we think we have. Yeah, that's
a that's a good, good point. And another thing about
algorithms to keep in mind too, To go back to
transactive memory for a second. Transactive memory works, it works.
Been using it for a while again, externalizing our memory
and the people around us. And again we're treating the
Internet the cloud more like a person than we're using
transactive memory when we engage with the cloud. But transactive
(36:11):
memory works best when you have a sense of how
your partner's mind works, how your how the coworker's mind work,
how your your mates mind works, etcetera. Um. With the Internet, though,
who knows the mind of the internet. The the the
Internet is not a person. It's this this vast uh
sea of knowledge, and it's ruled over by algorithms, by
(36:34):
media companies, by search terms and and what kind of
results that they're gonna they're gonna get you. Uh you
know again, what kind of what kind of mathematical equation
is deciding what information you see? What information is hidden
from you? So that's the quote unquote person that you're
that you're externalizing your memory in. That's interesting to look
(36:54):
at it as a partnership. And if you don't know
what the other side of that is, then how can
you really offshore that memory in a way that makes
you feel like okay about it? Yeah? I mean I
wouldn't go so far as to say that we are
outsourcing our memory to this dark, unknowable god, but it's
at least a gray, unknowable god. It's all part of
the Panopticon. It is, I have to say it that
(37:15):
way contractually, Okay. So it's an eye opening topic. Just
researching it made me really think about some of the
ways that I approach memory in my in my private life,
in my my home life, even in in in my
work life. Here, like, I can definitely see myself outsourcing
(37:36):
some memory test to you. Hopefully not too many of them,
but I know there are things. For instance, someone will
ask me about an episode we've done and they'll be like, oh,
you did that episode on such and such, and I'll
say and I'll either say or think, well, I don't
really recall that one all that much because I think
that the part you're asking about was a portion of
the podcast that Julie really had more of a handle on,
(37:56):
so like, on some level, I was saying, I don't
need to know that, because Julie is going to know that,
and vice versa, and I think it just kind of
brings home this idea that no man is an island
and to himself right right, as romantic as that idea is,
I mean, especially if you know, if you're a writer,
you're an artist, or you're a you know, a scientist
working on your own in the dark. We like to
think that where this there were this brain, this single
(38:16):
brain in the universe. But it's not that simple. We're
a brain in a body, and that brain that that
embodied brain is sharing a communal space with other embodied brains,
that's right. Or one big oozy organism, one big slime
mold trying to make its way through the maze of life.
It sounds like a good movie, which yeah, yeah, all right,
(38:37):
So there you have it. I'm sure everyone has some
interesting feedback on this particular topic, and we would love
to hear from you about it. Is how how do
you fear that feel that your memory has changed over
the course of the past a few decades, if you're
old enough to actually, um, you know, have have you
risen up on this this tide of internet and got
to experience it and then many of you were born
(38:58):
straight into it and maybe you have some feedback on
it as well. What do you think about this outsourcing
of memory and how do you think it's going to
affect us in the future. You can find us a
number of different ways, of course, as usual, just go
to stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. That is
our home base, that's the mothership. You'll find all the
podcast episodes there, the blog post, the videos, as well
as links out to our social media accounts like Twitter,
(39:19):
Facebook and Tumbler. And if you want to watch the
video specifically and you want to just be really focused
on that aspect of what we do, go to YouTube,
go to mind Stuff Show, hit that follow button and
then you'll be able to be right there on top
of everything. Let's put out Yeah, that mind Stuff show.
It shows us talking like in our human forms, and uh,
sometimes we we talk about the topics that we already cover,
(39:42):
and sometimes we go a little bit off script and
go into other bits of stuff. So yeah, and if
you've you've checked out the YouTube in the past and
you're like, I don't like what they're doing, etcetera. Check
it out in the future, because we have a whole
bunch of new ideas that are coming out. We've been
we've been learning how this video thing works as we go,
and I think we have some truly exciting content and
(40:02):
we have a lot of fully closed naked man that
we're featuring. Okay, yeah, good good. You can always finish
your thought by emailing us that blow the mind at
Discovery dot com. For more on this and thousands of
other topics, expeci at how stuff works dot com.
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey you wasn't the stuff to Blow
your mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas. Julie.
We live in a remarkable age, don't we. We certainly do.
We certainly do. We have um airplanes, true submarines, we
(00:25):
have satellites in orbit, and we have these amazing little
devices that we wear on our person at all times
that often feel like, uh, an extension of ourselves, and
we turn to them when we need to connect with somebody,
when we need to take a photograph of something happening
in our daily life, if we need to fact check something,
(00:47):
be it you know who starred in Beast Master? Or
I wonder what the name of this friend of a
friend is. What do you do you on Facebook and
you look for it, or you just need like simple um,
you know, conversions of figures or simple mathematics. What do
you do? You go fleeing to your your smart device?
Oh oh yes, yes, yes, well it is it is
(01:09):
the rolodex as well. It's all those things rolled up
into one and this little, uh, this little electronic organ
that lives in our pocket. I know. And the funny
thing about that is that this question I'm about to
post would be ridiculous ten years ago, but now I
think it matters. Have you ever tried to recall an
actual phone number stored in your cell phone? I'm talking
(01:31):
about a phone number of a close friend or a relative,
and you've come up just with snake eyes. Yes, but
and it was trying. There were times, not recently, but
like in the first two or three years. Maybe. UM,
I do remember having that problem where I need to
list my wife's number on something or call her from
(01:53):
from another phone. And I we weren't married at the time,
but still if she was the person I was talking
to the most on the phone, and I didn't have
her number memorized yet, so I had to make a
conscious decision, Okay, this is this is the one number,
This is the the only one, but this is the
one number I need to commit to memory besides my own. See,
this is a fine example of us humans outsourcing memory
(02:15):
to metal and plastic, and it's something that we've been
doing for a long time. But now I think it's
very obvious because, as you say this, these devices are
things that we rely on all the time. Yea. And
not just the devices, of course, but just the Internet itself.
I mean, as as writers, we've certainly seen this trend
over the years where it's I'm forgetting how to spell
(02:38):
things because the spell check is so ubiquitous, it's everywhere,
it's and you know, and and if it's not in
the program that I'm using, then it's then it's it
halts me, it brings me to a stop. I can't
finish the sentence because I suddenly have all these doubts
about the things that I've written. It's like, sometimes I
find myself in a form intentionally misspelling a word in
(02:58):
order to make sure that the word I just spelled
was actually correct and not uh and not you know,
it was in a situation where that the spell check
was somehow turned off or malfunctioning. And that's such a
good example of a microcosm of how you are taking
memory and just shuttling off to someone else or something.
And I think a good macrocosm of this would be
something like the cloud, which we are now all beginning
(03:20):
to back up to right right, your your photos, your
your basic information on your phone, important documents. Uh. I
still occasionally run across old floppy disks that I that
with labels on them where I had like worked on
a short story or part of a novel or something,
you know, fifteen years ago. And at the time I
(03:40):
was like, all right, this, this is important. I mean
to put this on the ZIP file and I'm gonna
store this in a different location it doesn't safe or something.
And now it's becoming increasingbly, you know, it just seems
silly because it's out there in the cloud. It's it's
stored safely, and you know, unknown storage facilities, electronic storage
facilities around the world. Well see, And I think this
all points to this idea that we are now at
(04:01):
the age of Watson. And when I'm talking about Watson,
I am talking about Jeopardy, of course, because this used
to be the game show in which humans would roll
out their memory prowess and show everybody how awesome we
were in that department. But along came, of course, an
artificial machine and and trumped Ken Jennings. Of course, this
is the the Jeopardy champ and map enthusiasts math yes,
(04:26):
and showed us how fallible our memories really are and
how we really do rely on outsourcing it and if
you're like me, you sat there thinking about all this
outsourcing of memory and you kind of shame yourself a
little bit because you think, well, you know, maybe I
should be making an effort to memorize these facts for
those who retain this information. But then on the other hand,
(04:47):
it makes a certain amount of economic sense, right, I mean,
our minds are in this universe having to navigate this
world of of physical objects, and in non physical idea
is abstract numbers, and it makes sense that like a
sly mold, we would figure out the shortest path through
the maze. And I like this idea of couching it
(05:10):
in slime mold because if you think about memory, it
kind of does have its place an emergence, right, and
this idea of all of us coming together as one
organism and making life work for us, and in this
case memory. So this is actually called transactive memory, and
it has been around since the dawn of man and woman,
(05:31):
right yeah, Because I mean if you are thinking about
early man trying to start a fire or trying to
create a stew, well, it's very possible that several people
know the steps in order to create this fire or
to create this this meal, and so everybody is relying
on each other to try to figure out how to
(05:52):
bring all of this to fruition. Right, So, you know,
think about the most complex do in the world, and
maybe it has fifty steps to it. Well, those fifty
steps are distributed among many people who don't have a
writing utensil or the internet at their disposal to try
to figure out how to do something. And this is, uh,
it's important to know. This is before the age of
(06:12):
specialization really takes off in a larger sense in the civilization.
You know, the idea that once you have a circles
of food, you don't have to hunt all the time,
and certain individuals can devote themselves to certain specialized tasks.
But it's what but, as we're discussing here, even before that,
there's a certain amount of specialization that ends up taking
place because we are externalizing the necessary information. We're essentially
(06:36):
outsourcing it to other members of our community. Now. Harvard
psychologist Daniel Witner, Ralph Eber, and Paula Raymond began to
study transactive memory in earnest in the eighties and they
found this is interesting in terms of specialization, that spouses
often divide up memory tasks. Yes, and this is really
the most um, this is the the example of this
(06:59):
is really I think the easiest for most of us
to understand because they also applied to not only two spouses,
but also to like close flint friends or or or
people that you're working with an a regular basis. So,
for instance, some of the stuff we're talking about here,
I recognize in our work process. You know. Uh, because
it comes down to to this, all right, you imagine
you're you and your coworker, you and your spouse. There's
(07:21):
certain information you need easy access to. Now at a
at a very economic level, think about it. Does it
make sense for you both to have that? You know,
if you need one bottle of water on a hike,
would you both carry a bottle of water? No, one
person would carry the bottle of the water of water
and the other person would say carry the cooler of sandwiches.
And with information with memory, it often ends up the
(07:43):
same way, and we end up at like, at a
subconscious level, we're doing this. You're not you know, you're
not actively thinking, well, my wife she's keeping track of
you know of of you know when we have to
go out of town. Uh, this weekend and what time
we need to leave or whatever. So I'll just let
her handle that, not because I would choose to forget that,
I would rather fill my brain with other things. No,
we we end up doing this at a sub conscious level,
(08:05):
just again, like that slime mold reaching out through the
maze to find the shortest way out. I know, I
was thinking about it in my own relationship with my spouse,
and I thought, well, he is the person who keeps
all the dates in his head as well as like
details about my personal family history as well as his,
because he's kind of he's the big memory there. But
I'm the person who does all the technology stuff. I
(08:27):
remember all the pasthwords, I remember all the steps to
switch between streaming and DVD and UM DVR and all
the different things that have to do with our internet
media consumption. And we've never talked about it and said, hey,
this is how we're gonna parse out our life together.
But that's just sort of how it has fallen to us.
So I think it's very interesting that we would shuttle
(08:49):
off certain things with people and go to them and say, okay,
how do you do this now? Of course, it's it's
important to mention in all this that the human memory
is is always flawed. I mean we've talked about this before.
Our memory of things that happened to us is flawed.
Every time we take that memory out of the drawer,
we alter it in some way, shape or form. And
when it comes to various factoids and specific details, uh,
(09:12):
that is another area where we just have built in limitations.
But this is where having a brainmate comes from play,
be it a spouse or just you know, a long
term uh, you know, co worker or friend. There was
a study we're looking at here from Cilia B. Harris
at All titled Collaborative Remembering When can remembering what others
be beneficial? And in this particular study, the researchers looked
(09:35):
at older couples who have been together for decades. Uh.
They separated them questioned individually about events years and years ago,
and uh, they stumbled on in details about past events
when they but when they question question them together, they
were able to retrieve even more information. And they they
observed that the the individuals were engaging in something called
(09:56):
cross queuing. So they're costing these clues back and forth
until they trigger enough memories in each other to recall
the total event. So it's like this collective memorization of
a past event, but they have to be together to
bring it out. It's like the wonder Twins powers activity.
That's so funny. I'm sure everybody has had that experience
before with someone. Now. Another example of creating a little
(10:22):
hold for our memory is a very interesting one to me,
and it has to do with photographs, because to me,
this is a very subconscious thing. You take a photograph, right,
and you think, I'm I'm on vacation, I've had this
wonderful moment, and I am remembering all of this, I'm
soaking it in. But that may not be the case.
We're of course talking about the photo taking impairment effect.
(10:43):
And uh, I think we've all encountered people at events,
strangers generally, who are taking photographs, and we've we've we've
met this with varying degrees of irritation or resentment. You know,
you're you're saying you're the Grand Canyon, and you're like,
I'm just I just want to take the sin, I
just want to experience it. And then there's here's somebody
(11:03):
that is, uh, you know, painstakingly setting up a camera
to take a photograph of it, and at times you
can be a little judge. You can think like, oh, well,
look at me, I'm living in the moment of this experience.
I'm experiencing it. A photograph can't even capture what I'm
seeing now, and you're looking at it through a camera
or growing up, I certainly remember seeing parents obsessed with
video cameras where it seems like they're observing their entire
(11:26):
the entire childhood of their offspring through the lens of
the video camera. Um also, and of course concerts are
even worse now. I was. I was a concert about
a year ago, like a heavy metal concert for this
band called Sugar, and the Sugar has been around for
a while, so you saw this differ. I think I
think there's some relation. It's to the aid issue, but
(11:49):
the other from Scandinavia, but they've been Yeah, they've been
around for a while and so they're they're fan base,
you know, ranges from you know people. I'm probably around
the middle of the the the the age of brackets
for the fans. So me and a friend of mine
were watching the show, but we couldn't help but notice
some of the younger fans who were basically experiencing the
(12:11):
live music through their their iPhones as they videotaped it,
and and we, you know, we were just like, this
is the most unmetal thing we've ever seen in their lives.
You know, you should be experiencing hell. So it's it's
easy to bring this this attitude into it. But then
you talk to somebody for whom photography is their passion,
is there is you know, even their you know their career,
(12:33):
and you know you you you have to admit that
this is the way that they take the beauty in
their life and and remember it, you know, well in
those cases. And we'll talk in a second about this study.
That sort of I think vindicates your feelings about being
at the Grand Canyon and someone looking at it through
a lens as opposed to experiencing it um In some ways,
(12:54):
I think the photographer might be able to have a
the professional photographer might have a better sense of those
events because they go through those images and they do
a lot of editing afterward, as opposed to someone who's
just happening happens to take a picture of that and
they put on Instagram at that moment. What it's also
something to be said, maybe I'm being judgy, but taking
a bad picture something and taking a good picture. For instance,
(13:15):
when I go to the aquarium and I see somebody
take a flash a direct flash image of something in
an aquarium tank, like they're not going to get a
good picture, Like like, it's not like you're gonna go
home and be and and you're gonna look at the
image that you took and it's just gonna you know,
time travel you back to when you were staring at
that octopus. No, you took a really bad photo of
something that was far more impressive in real life, whereas
(13:37):
you know, there are if someone actually knows what they're
doing in the camera there and with especially if the
appropriate editing is applied, you can create a more beautiful
vision of what you actually saw. I think that you
should create a pamphlet to give out at these various
places like the aquarium, just to do your duty here
as a little p s A. I have thought before
(13:59):
that I amost want to see a sign that's as
professional of photographers only. Um, I mean really that's kind
of when there's no photography allow That's basically what the
arrangement is like. If you want to photograph these works
of art, for instance, for fish, then you need to
know what you're doing. You need to get special permission
to do it. You want a giant thumb and the
kind of a world class work. Oh well, you know
(14:19):
that's the other thing. Like I when I go to
an art museum and uh, And I've been accused of
being a stump about about going to our museums before,
about not wanting to hear a bunch of people talk
at etcetera. And I and I want to clarify that
I do think it's okay to talk in a museum.
But when I'm trying to look at works of art
and people are busy getting their photograph made in front
of it, like that just drives me crazy, Like like
(14:41):
that the art, the art is the art we are,
you know, we should be here to appreciate the art,
not to say this is great. I love this painting.
It would be a little better for my memory that
I had a picture of me with it making the
victory sign with my fingers. All right, Remind me never
to attend the aquarium or a museum with you, because
I do like the photo bomb every once in a while.
So just saying, all right, we're talking about here is
(15:04):
Fairfield Universities psychologists Linda Hankel, who gave test participants a
digital camera in an itinerary of objects to view at
a museum on campus. There. Yeah, they said, go to
the museum, look at these particular exhibits. And some of
them were told, all right, take photographs of the whole thing,
you know, this particular painting, whatever. Just get a good
picture of this painting for me. Other people were told,
(15:25):
get some details, get the details of this paint They
were asked specifically to zoom in on the detail, okay,
and that's really important. And other people were just sent
to look at stuff exactly right, right, and not take
any photographs whatsoever. So the next day she showed them
pictures of the names of the objects they had seen,
or excuse me that she shown them pictures or the
names of the objects they had seen, and some they
(15:46):
hadn't seen at all, and she asked details about the
once they remembered. Now, test participants recognized fewer objects they'd
photographed whole right than those that they observed on their
museum tour, and they were much less accurate and recalling
visual details of museum objects they've photographed hole compared with
those that only observed unless they zoomed in with their camera.
(16:10):
So just the act of taking the picture allowed them
to use transactive memory, essentially saying I don't need to
remember this, this is getting documented, so I don't have
to crab my brain with us unless again they did
the whole zoom function, which changed, uh, their their mindset. Really,
it would change their cognitive function at that moment because
they had to hone in and really observe at that moment.
(16:32):
So you see how subconsciously we're doing this with photograph
and you have to wonder, what about the Internet? What
is that doing to the way that we uh shuttle
off memory. Yeah, that's essentially the big point we're getting
to here, especially concerning transactive memory. Again, that idea that
we're we're saying, all right, well, Judy knows how to
make this portion of the stew so I'm going to
(16:52):
uh and it is all subconscious. I'm going to forget
how to do that because I know that someone else
in my group is already specializing in that. That is
how we end up treating the Internet, That's how we
treat the cloud, not as a reference book that we
have at our disposal, but as a person, as as
if this is a member of our community who just
happens to say, remember all the fahrenheit celsius conversion tables?
(17:16):
Who who happens to remember who was in every movie ever?
Who happens to remember you know, even a little stuff
like what days to certain holidays fallen this year? I mean,
all the all of that information. They are this uber friend,
this friend made out of out of the internet. And uh,
and we treat that, we treat the cloud as if
it is this person and at least in our mind. Yeah,
(17:37):
And so the question becomes, how does this transactive memory
writ large affect our brain? And I'm sure everybody uh
is familiar with that by now famous two thousand and
eleven study about how Google has affected our memory and
has changed it in a sense um. The paper two
thousand eleven paper called Google Effects on Memory Cognitive consequences
(18:00):
of having information at our fingertips details research carried out
in four memory studies, and it was found in just
a general overview. It was found that if participants thought
that the information they were presented with was being backed up,
they were less likely to remember it. In addition, they
had this, uh, this one experiment involving difficult trivia questions,
(18:20):
and participants were more likely to subsequently quickly react to
words like Google and Yahoo. It was two thousand and eleven,
then the non computer related Nike in your play. So
the idea is that when we were asked about things
we don't know, our first instinct now is to think
about finding the information online. And I'm sure everybody's experienced
(18:42):
that too. I know that, you know, at least ten
times a day, I'll be thinking about something and I
and it's very actually very um disturbing to my process
if I'm trying to get something done in one large chunk,
because my room will will sort of say, okay, go
let's stop what you're doing right now and go look
that up. And it will be silly stuff too, like
I'll be researching something to do with, say, I don't
(19:04):
know quantum physics, and then I'll suddenly need to know
if a vagota is still alive or I want our
or the other day it was this, I suddenly had
to know what Mitch McConnell looked like when he was younger,
and incidentally I could find no evidence of what he
looked like when he was younger, Like the the earliest
image I found a Minch McConnell. He was he already
(19:24):
looked like he was in his fifties. So um, if
anyone out there can can que me into what he
looked like, it's stupid, it makes no sense. But for
some reason, my mind has to know what he looked
like when he was a younger man for no reason, Like,
I'm not obsessed with mint McConnell in any way shape
or form in a negative repositive. And it's funny. I
was looking at a paper on mirror neurons, and all
(19:44):
of a sudden I had the urge or this thing
bubble up in my brain of was Barbarella supposed to
be a scientist? And I was like, no, don't stop
what you're doing right now to look that up. Please don't.
But then you have to you have to run off
and uh and hopefully you'll find an answer. I'll get
thirty minutes just going down the rabbit hole. Well, you
(20:05):
know how it is that when we talk about memory
loop and like closing it, you know that that that
is going to continually pop up for me until I
go on Google what Barbara Ella's profession was. Yeah, I
mean I've I've seen the movie several times and I
can't remember off hands, so I think she was so listeners,
let us know Barbara Ella. What was her occupation? Mitch McConnell,
(20:25):
what do you do look like when he's a teenager?
All right, we should probably take a quick break and
when we get back, we are going to talk about
outsourcing your identity. Alright, we're back. What is your favorite
scene in Barbaralla? Well, there's so there's so much. I mean,
(20:47):
the thirteen year old boy and me still likes the
opening credits when she's floating around. But then there's the
weird stuff with the dolls attacking and the ice. There's
the queen with the horn coming out of her head,
the leather peep bowl, the angel dude, the orgasm machine.
I mean, it's just NonStop. Yeah, I think it's the
dolls with the razor sharp teeth that might be my favorite,
(21:10):
but you're right, it's hard to pick. All right. Um.
In the past, we have talked about something called the Panopticon,
and we talked about how when it comes to data
data tracking, UM, we have willingly handed ourselves over to
the pan panopticon that that I in the corporate sky
that tags every move we make on the Internet. That's right,
(21:30):
I mean cookies signaling where we've been. Uh. You know,
you're logging into into Facebook to view various accounts, various
news organizations, etcetera. So companies like Facebook ended up having
this rather remarkable picture of who and what you are,
just based on little individual bits about your interest. Because
not only do they know, well, here she is interested
(21:52):
in this, then they know well, if he or she
is interested in this, and they likely line up with
certain demographics surrounding that fan base. And it gets very analytical.
But in a sense, Facebook ends up knowing you better
than you know yourself. Yeah, and we'll get to some
of those uh analytics and how robust they are and
how they can predict what you're going to do and
who you may be about. But first I wanted to
(22:14):
share this tidbit from Slate magazine. It's an article by
Ed Finn, and he says, these days, when a computer
crunches the numbers and tells you this is who you are,
it's hard to contradict because there's more data about you
in the machine than there is in your head. Algorithms
are most effective at curating the information that's hardest for
us to hold in our heads. How long we talked
to mom, or what day of the week we've splurge
(22:36):
on an extra cookie? And I thought, yeah, that that
is right. There's a kind of a data read out
of yourself. It doesn't mean that's you necessarily, but it
might give you a clearer picture of the ways that
you behave at least the way that you're manifesting. I
guess now. One of the most extreme examples of the
predictive power of analytics, I think it is a Facebook example,
(22:58):
and it's from a user name that who detailed on
BuzzFeed how Facebook sorted out his sexual identity before anyone
else did. Right he uh. He He ended up seeing
an ad for for a for an article and it
was about coming out as gay. Yes, it was like
how to come out as gay or something to that effect, like,
so you've decided to come out, and here are the
(23:18):
events that led up to that. Because he was mortified
by this, because he thought, what is going on is
Facebook looking at my text messages on my iPhone? Because
the night before he had received that advertisement, he had
texted a friend for some advice on how to come
out to his parents. Yeah, because if anyone's not aware,
like this is still this is a huge deal in
an individual's life when they when they come out, even
(23:41):
just you know, partially to people in their surroundings about
their sexual identity. Right, this is very sensitive information. And
he wanted to try to get to the the end
of this and figure out how Facebook has served him
up such a an on target advertisement. Now it seems
like it's probably just coincidence, but he went for to
all of his activity on Facebook and everything that he
(24:03):
had ever liked or identified with had nothing to do
with being gay. And the only thing that might have
given Facebook a clue is that he made a comment
on a friend's link um and that the friends link
was Ohio Senator Rob Portman announced his support for marriage equality,
and his comment was just saying that nothing is cut
(24:25):
and dried, that's all. And most likely those algorithms, again
are pretty robust enough to have delivered him an advertisement
about sexuality and coming out. So, I mean, for some people,
obviously it's going to raise questions about you know why
he had just texted the night before and then received
(24:46):
the advertisement, but most likely again this just had to
do on that that one comment that he made, because
we're putting so much of ourselves out there into the
cloud that you know, we're building this kind of reflection
of who and what we are. Yeah, there's a there's
a fabulous episode of Charlie Brooker's Black Mirror that that
that utilizes this, where an individual dies passes away, and
(25:10):
that individual happen to be a heavy social media user
and this takes place in a fictional near future. But
after this happens, there's a service that allows uh that
allows you to communicate with sort of a reassembly of
that persona based on the information that they have placed online.
So essentially using the aga the algorithmic understanding of a
departed loved one to rebuild them in the digital world,
(25:34):
which we've talked about before. I just wonder if you
try to create your own image of yourself algorithmically how
and then sort of communicate with that person or that
being or that information, how close would that be to
who you feel you actually are? Yeah, well, there it
seems like you get into that whole issue about is
there a single unified me? You know, because I'm different.
(25:57):
I'm a different person inside, I'm a different person with
different people. We have mentioned this before, but it probably
bears mentioning again that web surfing habits may be able
to predict depression. You now, this is a two and
twelve study from Missouri University of Science and Technology. We're
talking about depression screening questionnaire that was administered to two
(26:20):
d and sixteen students. Thirty percent um were identified as
having perhaps depression. And what they did is they gained
access to that thirty percent of their internet usage, of
course with their permission. And what they found is that
depressed students tended to email an instant message more frequently,
and we're more likely to download videos or songs and
(26:42):
play more online games than those who weren't depressed. Of course,
I kind of take issue with that because sometimes I
think it's a matter of how much time you have
on your hands, and we are talking about students. Yeah, yeah,
it's true, and you know, it's also worth saying. And
it's also which which comes first, right, is their situations
where if one has a lot of free time on
(27:02):
their hands, maybe they're a little more prone to depression,
or maybe if something happens in one's life. That is,
you know, that might lead to depression. It may also
lead to a little more extra time, so you lose
your job. So I mean it's hard to really to
track it and pin it down to sus up. And
then what do you make of people who are life bloggers? Right?
People who are doing this on purpose. They're taking as
(27:25):
much data as they can and trying to make a
story of themselves about it intentionally, right, And we're talking
about like people who produce annual reports of their activity
as obsessively logged throughout the year, you know, which which
again kind of comes back to that idea of people
with photographic memories as as ultimately suffering from a severe
(27:45):
self obsession. And that's where all of this comes from.
This is a kind of the externalation of that using
various uh, you know, either record keeping devices or outright
social media devices to to just keep very precise records
of what's going on and externalizing all of their memory. Well,
and that's where this idea of the future of outsourcing
(28:07):
memory comes into play, because if just even ten years ago,
we weren't that dependent on our our smart devices, our smartphones,
what is the next ten years gonna look like when
you have something like Google glass amassing data in an
intentional way, right, I mean we're talking about video, we're
talking about photographs, um, and we're talking about uploading all
(28:29):
of that to the cloud. Yeah, I mean because these
photographs we take especially, I mean, they're they're they mean
a lot to us. You know, we're taking pictures of
our children, We're taking pictures of the places we go,
and like some of these end up being like the
last photographs of people before they die. You know, these
are these are essential things. And then for that to
to say suddenly vanished because you're you know, your phone
(28:51):
was lost or your account was hacked, like that could
be heartbreaking, right. So you know, you have things like Memoir,
which is an app that will sink and store photos
from your phone and your computer in the cloud, which
makes sense, right because you have all this stuff, what
do you do with it? And it organizes it all
by date and then pulls in data. This is the
interesting thing from social networks like Facebook, Instagram in four
(29:13):
square to provide more social context. So the idea here
that the co founder Lee Hoffman is trying to hone
in on is that he can create they can create
something like a memory, a real memory, because we know
a memory isn't just like a one thing. We know
it's connected to all sorts of stuff, probably things that
we can't even you know, quantify quite yet, but we
(29:35):
know that a memory has to do with smell and
taste and what you see at the time and what
you feel at the time is just pegged all these
different associations. Yes, and it's and and you can forget it,
and you can also you alter it every time you
you look at it, and it can be flawed for
a number of reasons. But what we're talking about here
is there the recording of saying, you know, actual image
of what happened, or an actual audio of what happened,
or a GPS tag of exactly where you were at
(29:57):
a given time. So memory in a sense becomes more
more exact. And oddly enough this factors and do another
episode of Black Mirror, The Entire History of You, which
came out in two thousand and eleven, UH and Black Mirror,
by the way, excellent series, but only for our mature
audience members out there, because it deals with some some
some pretty dark, bleak UH subject matter, and this particular episode,
(30:21):
the entire history of you. All of the individuals in it,
at least those who can afford it, have this thing
called a grain implanted. It's like a brain implant, and
it basically takes anything they see is recorded, like all
just the videotape of their entire life is seen through
their eyes, is recorded and then can be recalled later,
can be inspected, say at the airport before you board
(30:44):
a plane, they want to see your you know, your
flash through your last forty eight hours to make sure
you're not up to any any mischief. And another like
and basically the whole episode explores some of the various complications,
uh and traumas that can occur when you have that
kind of you call it, you're disposed. You know, that's
really interesting because I was just thinking about this other
device is called me Meadow, and it's a wearable camera
(31:06):
and it takes um five megapixel pictures every thirty seconds. Yeah,
it's like that kind of thing. Yeah, in two thou
eleven it was science fiction, near future science fiction, but
now we're already seeing the stuff rollout. And then you
have something called life Logger, which is actually another device
that will document your life for you sort it, upload it,
contextualize it. And I was thinking about this movie called
(31:29):
Until the End of the World. I think it came
out in the eighties but I can't remember. Um but
in it. The reason I bring it up is because
it's this post apocalyptic world and people have access to
their memories just like a film on these devices which
kind of looks like iPads now um or mini air iPads. Uh.
But anyway, they become completely obsessed in hamstrung in their
(31:52):
efforts to even kind of move forward in this life
because they just keep going over this information of excessively
of how their lives used to be. Yeah, I mean
it instantly brings to mind, you know, very very Buddhist
ideas of of peace. You know about how if you
if you were shackled to the past or shackle to
the future, then you're not really experiencing any amount of freedom.
(32:15):
You know, you're not living in the in the moment
at all. And it's it's important that we forget things,
you know. It's easy, it's easy to to discount that
and you know say, oh, I wish I remember this,
or I musha remembered that. And I was just thinking,
you know, we're talking about photographs. So, like, imagine a
time not too long ago where you had a loved
one die and and you know, if you didn't have
access to you know, paintings or drawings or whatever, you
(32:38):
could easily forget that person's face in a matter of time.
You know it would you would, or at least you
would you reach that point where we would doubt your
own memory of their face. And that's that's kind of
powerful to think about. But on the other hand, we
need to be able to forget things like painful memories
need to dull over time, Like time doesn't heal all wounds,
but it does feel some wounds, and we need those
wounds to heal well. If you have a memory that's
(32:58):
particularly special to you, the ability to dwell upon it
and obsess on it, does it become trite? Then it
becomes so well known and so well trod territory that
it becomes kind of dull to you. Yeah, potentially. Yeah, alright.
So the next thing we're gonna talk about before we
wrap things up here about outsourcing memory is something called
(33:19):
a neuroprosthesis, and I kind of want one of these.
It's not available for humans yet, but I see advantages here.
There's a team at wake Force University headed up by
Sam dead Wilder and by the way, funded this research
was funded by DARPA, and they created this neuropros thesis
(33:39):
that promotes task specific neural firing. So what they're talking
about is of course racist macaques, right, and which is
a huge step by the way that they're using these
primates as supposed to rats, which they're doing they've been
doing for years, um. But they take an array of
electrodes and they implant them into the hippocamp us of
(34:00):
the monkeys and they're able to both record neural activity
and stimulate it. And then using a mathematical model called
MEMO m I m O, the researchers determined the pattern
of activity that was seen when each animal correctly performed
each type of trial, which is called a strong code,
and then when they failed, which is called a weak code.
(34:22):
Now that the end all being of this thing is
that they were able to go in and manipulate the
strong code when they were going back to do this
specific task and then bolster the brain's memory the response
of what to do next, that is the correct thing
to do next. That is crazy, it's essentially an electronic
(34:43):
brain enhancer. Yes, and doesn't that kind of I mean
for certain tasks that seems like it might be kind
of lovely, right, I mean of assuming you can turn
it off, turn it on. But then some people might say, well,
why would you ever turn it off? And and to
what extent does it become like uh, you know, the
the issue of say, at all prescriptions in in in school.
(35:04):
You know, you might become addicted. Like you we were
like I don't know how to think without this thing exactly,
or I think I essentially they all look around you
a bit about electronic brain enhancers. Eat, so they show
somebody with that's addicted to electronic brain enhancers and they're
just like sweating in a room and they have like
several these little electroids attached to their their head. But yeah,
but you get into issues like is it fair that
(35:25):
some people have have have these things and some people don't,
and then there are some people too dependent upon them. Uh,
it gets our cybernetic future is is weird? Well, does
that take away the sense of free will to write?
Because narrative is something we shape and we decide how
we're going to report the facts and and think about things,
and if it's there, if there are a set of
algorithms doing that for us, maybe then we don't really
(35:48):
have the free will we think we have. Yeah, that's
a that's a good, good point. And another thing about
algorithms to keep in mind too, To go back to
transactive memory for a second. Transactive memory works, it works.
Been using it for a while again, externalizing our memory
and the people around us. And again we're treating the
Internet the cloud more like a person than we're using
transactive memory when we engage with the cloud. But transactive
(36:11):
memory works best when you have a sense of how
your partner's mind works, how your how the coworker's mind work,
how your your mates mind works, etcetera. Um. With the Internet, though,
who knows the mind of the internet. The the the
Internet is not a person. It's this this vast uh
sea of knowledge, and it's ruled over by algorithms, by
(36:34):
media companies, by search terms and and what kind of
results that they're gonna they're gonna get you. Uh you
know again, what kind of what kind of mathematical equation
is deciding what information you see? What information is hidden
from you? So that's the quote unquote person that you're
that you're externalizing your memory in. That's interesting to look
(36:54):
at it as a partnership. And if you don't know
what the other side of that is, then how can
you really offshore that memory in a way that makes
you feel like okay about it? Yeah? I mean I
wouldn't go so far as to say that we are
outsourcing our memory to this dark, unknowable god, but it's
at least a gray, unknowable god. It's all part of
the Panopticon. It is, I have to say it that
(37:15):
way contractually, Okay. So it's an eye opening topic. Just
researching it made me really think about some of the
ways that I approach memory in my in my private life,
in my my home life, even in in in my
work life. Here, like, I can definitely see myself outsourcing
(37:36):
some memory test to you. Hopefully not too many of them,
but I know there are things. For instance, someone will
ask me about an episode we've done and they'll be like, oh,
you did that episode on such and such, and I'll
say and I'll either say or think, well, I don't
really recall that one all that much because I think
that the part you're asking about was a portion of
the podcast that Julie really had more of a handle on,
(37:56):
so like, on some level, I was saying, I don't
need to know that, because Julie is going to know that,
and vice versa, and I think it just kind of
brings home this idea that no man is an island
and to himself right right, as romantic as that idea is,
I mean, especially if you know, if you're a writer,
you're an artist, or you're a you know, a scientist
working on your own in the dark. We like to
think that where this there were this brain, this single
(38:16):
brain in the universe. But it's not that simple. We're
a brain in a body, and that brain that that
embodied brain is sharing a communal space with other embodied brains,
that's right. Or one big oozy organism, one big slime
mold trying to make its way through the maze of life.
It sounds like a good movie, which yeah, yeah, all right,
(38:37):
So there you have it. I'm sure everyone has some
interesting feedback on this particular topic, and we would love
to hear from you about it. Is how how do
you fear that feel that your memory has changed over
the course of the past a few decades, if you're
old enough to actually, um, you know, have have you
risen up on this this tide of internet and got
to experience it and then many of you were born
(38:58):
straight into it and maybe you have some feedback on
it as well. What do you think about this outsourcing
of memory and how do you think it's going to
affect us in the future. You can find us a
number of different ways, of course, as usual, just go
to stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. That is
our home base, that's the mothership. You'll find all the
podcast episodes there, the blog post, the videos, as well
as links out to our social media accounts like Twitter,
(39:19):
Facebook and Tumbler. And if you want to watch the
video specifically and you want to just be really focused
on that aspect of what we do, go to YouTube,
go to mind Stuff Show, hit that follow button and
then you'll be able to be right there on top
of everything. Let's put out Yeah, that mind Stuff show.
It shows us talking like in our human forms, and uh,
sometimes we we talk about the topics that we already cover,
(39:42):
and sometimes we go a little bit off script and
go into other bits of stuff. So yeah, and if
you've you've checked out the YouTube in the past and
you're like, I don't like what they're doing, etcetera. Check
it out in the future, because we have a whole
bunch of new ideas that are coming out. We've been
we've been learning how this video thing works as we go,
and I think we have some truly exciting content and
(40:02):
we have a lot of fully closed naked man that
we're featuring. Okay, yeah, good good. You can always finish
your thought by emailing us that blow the mind at
Discovery dot com. For more on this and thousands of
other topics, expeci at how stuff works dot com.
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