EL: The Webcam is already small and inexpensive, with a price tag
of less than a hundred dollars. Most popular are the
property-surveillance devices. You can check on your vacation home via a
simple phone call. But you can also broadcast your video monitor over the
web so anyone can look.
WC: And there will be automatic face recognition. A display on your
eyeglasses might allow you to view the results of a database search. The
person's name would be flashed on the inside of your eyeglasses. When you
ask, "What is her name?" the traditional limitations of human memory will
be transcended.
EL: So what's the next decade of memory therapy going to be like?
Psychotherapy with a pharmaceutical booster? I can envision 21st-century
memory doctors helping clients with their academic performance by
prescribing additives for the coffee they drink before an upcoming test.
They might even begin their psychotherapy sessions with a drug that
enhances the malleability of memory, making the patient more susceptible
to positive suggestions that occur later in their session.
WC: More of human memory will move offline. We'll rely more on
digital storehouses full of video and audio files of our lives. It'll
happen because digital storage is cheap--and hopefully because we also
realize how unreliable human memory can be. Maybe some of the storehouses
will be portable, like today's music for joggers, and will provide you
with help in remembering people and places.
EL: But when we do get the false memory recipes down pat, we'll be
left with critical questions. Who controls that technology? What brakes
should be imposed on police, lawyers, advertisers and others who try to
manipulate people using these findings? When memory creation technology
becomes readily available, how will society protect itself from misuse?
We'll need to constantly keep in mind that memory, like liberty, is a
fragile thing.
READ MORE ABOUT IT
The Myth of Repressed Memory Elizabeth Loftus and Katherine
Ketcham. (St. Martin's Press, 1994)
Witness for the Defense: the Accused, the Eyewitness, and
the Expert Who Puts Memory on Trial Elizabeth Loftus and Katherine
Ketcham. (St. Martin's, 1991)
Lingua ex Machine: Reconciling Darwin and Chomsky With the
Human Brain William Calvin and Derek Bickerton (MIT Press,
2000)
The Cerebral Code: Thinking a Thought in the Mosaics of the
Mind
PHOTO (COLOR): The Memory Doctors: Elizabeth Loftus and William
Calvin
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