A Clouded Memory

The Matrix

Remember the Information Superhighway? Used to be a buzzword about a decade and a half ago. No one uses it any more! I read about this study by Columbia University psychologist, Betsy Sparrow published a little while ago and I was reminded of the concept, and how it is finally coming to fruition. 

Scenario: two colleagues are talking about their favorite author or poet (who I've never heard of) while I'm sitting at my desk. I quickly Google the name, and join in the conversation - but I enter it saying "such and such" is my favorite poem by this poet... particularly the line "..."

First, a Tangent...

Madeleines - Photo by Bernard Leprêtre

Marcel Proust wrote a novel in seven volumes (or six, depending on how you look at it) called À la recherche du temps perdu translated in English as either "Remembrance of Things Past" or "In Search of Lost Time". The book, often called the greatest novel ever written, is popular for the notion of "involuntary memory" - exemplified by the "episode of the Madeleine" - where eating the dainty cake triggers memories the protagonist did not know he had, or did not hope to recollect. It is a lovely concept right?

Yeah, I've never read In Search of Lost Time.

In Shakespeare's "Hamlet", (a play which by the way exists in three versions - the First Quarto, the Second Quarto, and the First Folio) perhaps the most famous line is "To be or not to be", which launches the Prince of Denmark's soliloquy regarding whether or not to commit suicide. The only thing keeping him from dying is the fear of the afterlife - of 'what dreams may come' in the slumber of death... "What Dreams May Come", is also the title of Richard Matheson's novel about a dead man en route to heaven, who takes a detour to rescue his wife from hell (she was sent there for committing suicide, unable to bear losing her husband). Robin Williams played the part of the dead man in the movie version. This single soliloquy has inspired several other titles - "All My Sins Remembered", the last line, is a science fiction novel by Joe Haldeman, and "The Undiscovered Country" was the title of the fifth Star Trek movie...

Hamlet kills Claudius

Of course I've never read or attended a performance of Hamlet, except a Marathi adaptation in which my father played Claudius... I was probably five. The only thing I remember is crying when my father was "killed" onstage, and how the lady playing Gertrude kept saying Hamlet like "Omelette" and I laughed about it when some grown-ups did. Ay, as the Bard says... 

There Lies The Rub

These days it doesn't take much for me to pretend I've read Proust or that I am a great fan of the Bard and have read every play. It is easy for me to wax eloquent about my favorite character from his plays, say Caliban - so long as I have my phone on me. Having heard and noted the phrase "There lies the rub" for example, in a dialogue spoken by the enterprising thief played by Clive Owen in "The Inside Man", I can quickly Google it, find the Hamlet connection, and quickly find the soliloquy in full on Wikipedia, and then follow a chain of articles that inform me with the kind trivia I live for... This Erudition Scam is enabled of course by everyone's favorite search engine, Google, and the World Wide Web.

Which Brings Us Back To

The Columbia Study, titled "Google Effects on Memory: Cognitive Consequences of Having Information at Our Fingertips" is a very interesting one indeed. While its results are still being pored over by smarter people than me, these things caught my eye: 

1. The study indicates that the subjects are more focused on  remembering how some data is organized and how to get to it, rather than remembering the objective facts in glorious detail. Ergo, the subjects seem confident that information will be available for retrieval later - and are primarily concerned with knowing how to fetch it when they need it!
2. More importantly, our brains are turning into a set of index cards - or a relational database - where the data itself resides in the cloud!

Your ken - the range of your knowledge or sight - is no longer the data you possess. It is instead the data structures you maintain...

My Take

I don't want to get into the whole "today versus yesterday" debate, but reading about this study got me thinking about how profound its implications are. There are take-aways for anthropologists, educationists, psychologists, cognitive scientists, and the general public too! While some will look at this study as a "sign of the times", I am sure others will shake their head and go "look what the world is turning into".

I, for one, am an optimist and think this change is for the better. I have to, I suppose, because this is pretty much describing my lifestyle. I love trivia. I cannot imagine a life without Wikipedia, and IMDB, and Allmusic, and most importantly Google. I like the idea of the cloud as an extended hard disk for my brain, and my brain as the relational key that links and organizes all the data in the cloud based on my own life experience. I am astounded by the possibilities... 

And Finally... The Scam That Isn't

Yes - I admit to running the Erudition Scam often myself. Here's the thing though... it isn't really a scam. To those who think it is easy to pull off, I welcome you to try. It isn't easy. In fact, it is incredibly hard. You see, even for the most computer savvy search guru, there needs to be that first glimpse or insight into what to search for! All those who have had the pleasure of giving open book exams without any preparation will attest to this difficulty I speak of. 

The less you read, the less wide your horizons, the fewer life experiences you have, the more restricted is your ken. When you go riding on the information superhighway your ken determines what parts you access and assimilate. You may find some information and be able to carry on a five minute conversation on any topic using your web fu, but after five minutes, the quality of your relational database shows. Moreover, after these five minutes are done, you do in fact retain some of what you hastily 'researched', and so you do end up enriching your life...

I guess what I'm saying is, like the nameless protagonist from Proust's novel, the next time you eat a Madeleine that tickles at your memory with an association, do remember to use the Cloud and improve your recall!