What if, trivially and unfailingly, you could re-live your memories in exacting detail? Like pressing play on a favorite movie, you are transported back in time. You see as you did, hear as you did, feel as you did back then?
Despite the enormous storage capacity of our biological brains (estimated at 2.5 petabytes), we forget things all the time, both trivial and consequential. That’s part of the charm and harm of the medium—the neural pathways we exercise most often stick with us, while much else withers and fades away into obscurity. Despite our remarkable potential, our brains are ‘use it or lose it.’
So, even our most vivid recollections from our favorite (or least favorite) days, or even moments, are incomplete. Maybe a sampling of our senses and emotions are retained, especially the exceptional highs and dreadful lows, but so much else is flattened, simplified, or altogether forgotten. We tend to compress or completely disregard the tedious, unremarkable, and boring.
All this preamble leads to the question on my mind recently—what if we could store and then access perfect recall at will? Let’s say that a techno-libertarian cyberpunk dystopia looms ever closer, anyone can pay to install a hard drive in their head. What does this new capability to remember in exacting, excruciating detail, do to us?
There’s a reason that the saying ‘time heals all wounds’ tends to be correct, and I think it comes down to the biological mechanisms of memory. All memories flatten and simplify over time. A day later, we remember finer details, sensory experiences, and the play-by-play of the pain, or hurt, or embarrassment. After a week, some of those finer details have faded away. After a month, you probably won’t remember the temperature of the room. After a year, only the bullet points.
When the memory is reduced to its essence—the highlight that sticks with us near forever, at least going by a few of my own least favorite recollections—you have the power to re-contextualize. How you feel today can impact your outlook on something that happened long ago. This is how we learn to forgive. And grow. And become more complete individuals.
I’m not sure that happens when most of us are running around with hard drives in our heads. Like computers, we never lose a single byte. We can completely play back our worst (or best) days—high-definition sight, sound, and sensory perceptions, while we re-feel exactly as we did back then. There’s no chance to reinterpret or reassess your feelings. You are frozen in thought, exactly now as you were then. With an artificially perfect memory, slights are eternal. Grudges don’t mend. The hurt never blunts. The machine parts of ourselves drive us toward colder, sharper-edged world.
Except for the present moment, we’re little more than the sum of our memories. How fortunate, then, that time can heal wounds and our fleshy, wrinkly brains can soften our view of the world.