Sanity is a triumph (day 127)

We apparently forget most of our day when we go to sleep.  Only the most salient parts remain and even they are blurred into prior similar experiences.  I've probably written about this in another blog post, in fact.  I have a vague notion that I have but it's blurred enough that I'll assume it's acceptable to write about it again because presumably the memory will also be blurry in my reader's minds.   How voluntary that nightly amnesia+blurring might be is, I suppose, a matter of definition.  It is my being that is doing the forgetting after all.  If I wanted to keep something in memory presumably I would and could take the necessary steps (all systems operating within normal parameters, assumed).  

The forgetting that is annoying is more the short term forgetting.  The distracted attention that comes from multiple threads competing for attention combined with lack of sleep, and...age.  Yes age.  I'm 38 and I think I can say this without eliciting laughs of derision from baby boomers.  But who knows.  In any case, I notice the difference...I think.  The problem is that I don't have a clear memory of how my mind functioned when I was in my 20s.  I remember not keeping a calendar because I could remember all my appointments in my head.  But that may have been because I didn't have that many appointments and no one scheduled an appointment weeks in advance.  I remember new facts being easy to remember.  I kept all phone numbers in my head.  Perhaps the most telltale sign of decline though is that I don't remember being anxious about forgetting at all.

But rather than think of it as a decline I choose to look at it as a triumph of organization.  It is rather miraculous that sanity prevails in most of us given the accumulation of experiences and knowledge and the relentless progression of time.  Think of the network and partitions needed to make all that (potentially contradictory) information stay together, and still allow you to utter things like "I need to do the dishes".   Marvelous.  The fact that I sometimes forget little things is forgiven in a flash of admiration.

But for those that are still worried, the NY Times says we can look for contrarians to keep our brains nimble.  And I don't think they mean 2 years olds, though in my experience toddlers are a great source of brain scrambling experiences.

A song for this post.

There's more here (day 47)

Geotagging is hot.  I like the idea of say Twitter being geotagged a lot except it brings up a bit of anxiety about being too public.  This is different than the stage fright I felt when I opened my first blog nine years ago.  At that time I was afraid of the judgment, not so much people knowing too much.  That fear came later when it became obvious that the internet does not easily forget.   Geotagged twitter or any immediately broadcast note service is like painting graffiti out in the open.  It better be good and/or sanctioned.    It brings up so many issues of what one may do with a simple lat long.  If that lat long happens to index government land,  are there restrictions on what you can say?  What about a mall or a store?   Owners of that spot will want to control what gets posted.

Geotagging is an extension of the 'i like it, i don't like it' principle to place which in some ways makes it much more personal.   Still I can see so many good things that could happen.  Favourite places can be highlighted with instructions about where to look, history sliders could highlight the changes in that place, stories of that place, replays of the last year's tweets to/on that place, songs tagged to that place.   It really could be little treasures to be found on an ordinary stop somewhere.  Ordinary magic really.   People could leave compliments about each other's houses or garden (I know I'm heading fast into Utopia).   The landscape could respond with subtle clues that geotagged content would complement the experience if we let it.  

The upshot is that we leave traces of ourselves as a matter of daily life and it's being extended into the digital and then back into the physical.   Geo-tagged visualizations will be interesting: as always aesthetically pleasing aggregators will be great gifts.   I think sound will also play an important role in how we become aware that a certain place is rich with content.   Still the issue of forgetting remains.  In real life traces fade and biodegrade.  Not so in the geotagged world.  Maybe forgetting is just something we selectively apply to data as a matter of habit and ethic.

A song for this post.

What you don't know (day 44)

Apparently when we go to sleep we forget most of what happened during our day.  Only the unusual gets stored in a way that can be recalled in more details.  The rest gets absorbed and reinforces certain patterns or inhibits them.  The point is that we think we know what happened yesterday but we're missing big chunks.  This gets worse as time goes on.  We have very little recall of what happened last week and even less last month and last year.    There was a book written recently that talks about why life speeds up as we age.  One of the points mentioned was the repetition of pattern with less new or unusual stimulation.  The older you get, the more you've done and seen, and the harder it is to stimulate the brain to create a new memory.   Memories are intimately linked with time perception.  They also mention the fact that a year when you're 60 is not the same as a year when you're 4.  One is 1/60th of a life lived, the other is a quarter.   I'm not sure I buy that argument for life speeding up but it's a worth a reflection.   I know that the older I get the more paranoid I am about what I'm not perceiving either deliberately or through forgetfulness or just plain physiology.  I think about a certain mood I was in a few weeks back and it seems so foreign, like another person.   Yet I know it will happen again.  I'm puzzled by the contrast between immediate control and long term uncertainty.

If you know french, Jacques Languirand spoke about the book mentioned above on his show Par Quatres Chemins.

A song for this post.