The quest for immortality can now take a digital form, with a gadget that takes a photo of the world as you see it every thirty seconds, and so has the ability to create an unbroken log of your life from start to finish. Kurt Kleiner reports for the New Scientist:
A camera you can wear as a pendant to record every moment of your life will soon be launched by a UK-based firm.
Originally invented to help jog the memories of people with Alzheimer’s disease, it might one day be used by consumers to create “lifelogs” that archive their entire lives.
Worn on a cord around the neck, the camera takes pictures automatically as often as once every 30 seconds. It also uses an accelerometer and light sensors to snap an image when a person enters a new environment, and an infrared sensor to take one when it detects the body heat of a person in front of the wearer. It can fit 30,000 images onto its 1-gigabyte memory.
The ViconRevue was originally developed as the SenseCam by Microsoft Research Cambridge, UK, for researchers studying Alzheimer’s and other dementias. Studies showed that reviewing the events of the day using SenseCam photos could help some people improve long-term recall.
It’s just about memory. But the beauty and genius of the human memory is in fact the way it allows us to forget – selectively. We all dream of having a photographic memory, but this would only create information overload. And we’d have to sift through the same stuff all over again in order to see what was significant, what was actually worth remembering in the first place – and worth forgetting. We create the person we are in the present by what we choose (consciously and subconsciously) to remember and what to forget.
This gadget reminds me of the lovely central idea from the 1995 film Smoke. Harvey Keitel plays a tobacconist around whose shop the main characters revolve.
He has an unusual habit: every morning, at the same time of the day, he photographs the same street corner, and puts the pictures together in a series of albums. It’s time-lapse photography on an enormous scale. He can’t explain why he does it. He just needs to do it. And it’s a really marvelous device for delivering the movie’s main theme: everything that matters, all the meaning in the world that can be condensed from holy books and vows and catechisms and poems, is right there before us. We just need to have the eyes to see it. [Imbd]
Yes, there is a longing in the human heart to hold onto the past. But the real question is how we take it into the future. And no amount of digital technology is going to help us answer that.
On the opposite level of the spectrum, have you seen “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”, in which Jim Carey and Kate Winslet (fabulous with blue and orange hair) scientifically alter their memories after a bad break up so they “erase” each other from their memories? I love the movie. It really makes you think about all the memories you have the might cause you pain or regret or what have you, and the ides of not having them at all. If you haven’t seen it, you should!
Oh, feliz belated cumpleaños, by the way! I hope it was a good one!
Yes – it’s a fascinating film. And all these Sci-Fi films like Total Recall with memories implanted or taken away…
Thanks for a thought-provoking post. Call me a Luddite, but I see this as yet another example of technology allowing us to do something that we really don’t need to do. Aside from the fact that it will at best be a temporary slow down for early stages of Alzheimers, it creates the risk that people will be spectators rather than participants in their own lives. I like your comment about the importance of forgetting. And it’s also important to remember that life is more than just about them.
I think one photo a week would be enough for me! And a vast improvement on the present (which is pretty random).