Save to the Hard Drive for the Archive...

One of my favorite pieces of hardware, besides a landphone... is a Hard Drive. Why such a seemingly nondescript piece of equipment? I don't know, there's just something very cool, and interesting about the idea of a device that replicates memory. I mean the human brain, which itself is a pretty poor hard drive, pales in comparsion to harddrives today. While human memory and computer memory aren't seemingly comparable, I beg to differ. The thoughts and memories that we have as humans, are stored but in general this is a very loose storage system. Especially if an event wasn't very memorable. What happened on a random Sunday afternoon 3 years ago? Hell if I can remember... Human memory is much more..organic, it comes and goes, some of it sticking with us to the day we die, and others become chipped, faded, and disappear entirely. We humans are obviously also suseptable to diseases that destroy the lucidity of memory, leaving it fragmented, and useless.

Replacing the familiar Hard drive disk, is the newer, faster, and more coherent, Solid State Drive. Which instead of the spinning platters that HDD's are composed of, these SSD's are, as I'm sure most of you already know, computer chips. Like larger USB drives. While its nothing so groundbreaking, but this leap from the platteres to chips, is just another step, that I think brings us closer to a goal that would be truly awe inspiring. I've mentioned it before in this blog, but inventing the ability to store human memory onto these chips would be such an idea that if and when created, it would really change our world. Think about it, we could sell piano lessons, or go to the grocery store, and pick up a memory of last year's World Cup. Someone could witness, a murder, be able to download the memory onto a chip and replay it to the police. The possibilities are endless. Granted this may not be a good thing.. Instead of me going out and taking Taekwon do lessons, I can have them uploaded to my brain, while I sit on the couch...

Sound familiar? In the matrix movies, its characters often find themselves in need of a set of skills that they don't posses. Do from an uplink from their central system, they have instructions uploaded to this. And in a manner of seconds, they're professionals at whatever task needed doing. Now I'm not saying that we'll be able to download kung fu lessons just yet, if you look up a project called BrainGate, it explains why I brought this up. The idea that human memory can be recorded and later used and viewed isn't new but it hasn't been anything but, at best science fiction.  Think this idea would take off? Buying and selling experiences, and memories. You could program it to save the early years of your child hood, and you can play it back when your older and recall events that normally would have been lost to time. 

Human memory, ( a concept that I admittedly don't fully understand) is a very spread out and 'organic' process. When I was in grade school, my teachers would refer to memory as a big filing cabinet locked away in our cranium. But now, as my reading of the matter continues, it's come out that it doesn't work in such a 'solid state' sort of way. Many area's of the brain contribute to your remembering. If you think about a dog, you think of many different senses that make up what a dog is. Its feel, its sound, its shape, and form.

Anyway I hope this all made sense and gave you some reason to think about what the future of recording from experience, or RFE (I may be the first to coin this, so you heard it hear first folks) has to offer. I'm calling it, if anyone at there would be able to do something like this, I'd leave it to Google. They will launch GoogleLife  in the mid 2020's, in which google will allow you to use there servers to upload all your memories!