You can remember everything

Gordon Bell is an amazing man. He is in his 70s, still works at Microsoft and can remember every single event that has happened in his life for several years. So how does he do that? He is using technology, including a large slice of Internet technology, to help him. Every phone call he makes is automatically recorded, stored in a database, indexed and annotated. If you ask him what you said in a phone call to him five years ago, he can almost instantly tell you word for word. He is not alone, though. Many people now store their pictures online, at places like Picassa. Instead of having to remember all the events in your life, you just store them online, add some keywords then you can be reminded of them by a simple search. We are using Internet technology to increasingly replace what our brains used to do. That has significant implications in a psychological sense and I explore some of them in my article in today’s Daily Telegraph newspaper. You can read the online version of my article in the Digital Life section.