Memory
When I was much younger, I worried intensely about my memory--that it would one day fill up, that it would be distorted, and so on. Without good memory, how could we improve ourselves? Wouldn't we end up in repeating patterns of learning fact B, correcting, forgetting fact A, correcting, and forgetting fact B again? Memory limits the difficulty of the problems we can solve. Already in my research, I find myself forgetting and relearning the same information. What if I were able to retain 1000 facts instead of 200 and survey all of them at once? I'm sure I could develop much better solutions. This is why so many problems need multiple people working on them. (The problem of self-development usually gets only one person, however, with occasional assistance from good friends and therapists! It's in much worse shape.)
I was flipping through an old New Yorker last night and stumbled on an article ("Remember This?") on the research of Gordon Bell. Bell is trying to develop apps for cataloguing life very thoroughly. He wears a gadget that photographs most people he meets. He records many of his conversations. One of the problems he faces is in accessing the stored information--another researcher has his computer learn which kinds of photographs from his personal database would be most meaningful to show. Bell suggests that it would be useful if computers could also learn to make observations--"You haven't seen X in several years." (This feature would be brilliant with my pdf organizer, Papers. I forget what I read a year ago.)
This sounds a little neurotic, but I've this sneaking suspicion that I'm limited in my ability to change by the fact that I can't synthesize my personal history very well. I probably have a distorted image of who I was. How lame not to have data to test models. One resorts to... public heuristics or local models.
Software like this is so exciting. My favorite line from the article is at the very end: Bell says, "Your aspirations go up with every tool. You've got all this new content there and you want to use it, but there's always this problem of wanting more." Finding intuitive and efficient organizational systems--and learning what to delegate to them--will be a major challenge for me, I think.
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Comments
You're right that I can sort my Papers articles by date last read or read count, but that doesn't shake things up much. My library's way too big. Some sort of pseudo-random "reminder" function would be a nice feature request, though.
Don't you think that the only reason we retain relevant memories is that space is limited? Seems like when I was younger, I really loved learning random trivia for the hell of it. I was also able to retain vast amounts of it. Now I'm in the same camp as you. Unless spectacularly interesting, new facts must relate to what I'm doing this month or they get dumped in the nightly trash. :( I would love to have information sit around indefinitely while my brain does linking at night, in the shower, and so on.
Heh. The problem may just be that my concerns are too narrow now. Maybe, deep down, I don't care as much about the Supreme Court as I used to? I'm always looking up names. Depressing.
As for constructing a coherent personal history. It is impossible to construct anything but a subjective "meta-narrative" based on your recent experiences/understandings. We are selective in our memories and certainly selective in ascribing significance to events. Introducing further facts won't change your perspective unless they are accompanied by a problematic (in a theoretical sense...defining scope, offering contradictory secondary effects) outside interpretation. "All fact is theory-laden."-Talcott Parsons. In other words, if you are concerned with advancing your self-theorization you should talk to others about experiences you share and listen to the narrative they construct to comprehend you. Out of the comparison of your "Sarah' and their "Sarah" you may find the basis for a reevaluation. Hope that wasn't too cryptic.