A Thought or Two on Memories.

Has anyone else noticed the new functions in gmail? ‘Colored labels’ came out yesterday and today’s new addition is ‘AIM in gmail’. While poking around gmail, I noticed something about the saved chats: if the conversation was at a standstill for over five minutes, gchat will actually indicate that via a thin grey line in between responses and show the number of minutes that elapsed. Strange right? So not only are my conversations recorded verbatim, the moments of typing ’silence’ are also explicitly pointed out to me. Why is that?! What purpose does that serve for my brain? As in, why would I even care to know/want to remember that X amount of minutes passed by in between communication exchanges?

It’s not a big deal; I’m simply perplexed gchat would bother to indicate that piece of info. Makes me think about both the concept and function of memory. There certainly has been a lot of press coverage on memory lately, from Scientific American Mind to National Geographic. The NG article mentioned something very fascinating:

“Over the past millenium, many of us have undergone a profound shift. We’ve gradually replaced our internal memory with what psychologists refer to as external memory, a vast super-structure of technological crutches that we’ve invented so that we don’t have to store information in our brains.”

Technically then, we’ve gone from remembering everything to remembering very little. Today’s technology allows us to record EVERYTHING, but there was a time when cameras didn’t exist and people had to rely on the mind (or hand-drawn representations) to visualize someone. So if we can only choose between one or the other, which is better? Being able to capture every moment and revisit it at a later time? Or keeping the moments solely in one’s mind? Can’t say I can answer the question myself, but it’s certainly something to think about. Undoubtedly, there are implications to the outsourcing of memory via technology that is rampant in daily living today. I can’t help but think that, along with the reliance of tech inventions to be our personal memory banks, has something been lost in return?

I’ll end with one last piece of food for thought: recently read an article on a young man who volunteered his time in a homeless shelter for the old and dying. While all the residents have very little personal belongings, they all have at least one or two things they keep on their night stands. It could be anything: a photo, a trinket of sorts, a book, a letter, etc. While low in material value, these things are the most prized possessions because of their high sentimental value. Attached to the items are memories of times-gone-by, which are the only things the residents have to hold on to in their last days. Thus, the conclusion made by the young man was: in the end, regardless of where life takes us, all we really have and own are our memories.

Hmm, that’s some profound statement he made. I’m already not one to use cameras frequently, but I’ll defintely think twice before taking my next camera-phone shot.