Total Recall: How the E-Memory Revolution Will Change Everything Read Online Free PDF Page B

mine your digital memory archive for patterns and trends that you could never uncover on your own—graphing, charting, sorting, cross-sectioning, and testing for hidden correlations among all your bits. Imagine if you could bring into a single database all the pictures you take, all the places you visit, all the routes you take, all your notes and annotations, all your e-mails, along with room temperatures, weather conditions, diet, activity, whom you met with, your meeting cancellations, what you read, when you worked, what TV shows you watched, your mood swings, your flashes of inspiration. What would happen if you could take that whole slurry of life-history fragments and run it all through a powerful pattern-detection program? What kinds of patterns might you find?
    Digital memories can improve your health and extend your life. Equipped with new generations of personal sensing devices, you’ll be able to collect torrents of physiological data from yourself—alpha waves, dips in cortisol, temperature, pulse, sweating, and scores of other measures—in real time.
    And the health benefits of Total Recall aren’t limited to those with known health risks. Whether it’s sticking to your exercise plan, watching your weight, battling insomnia, managing allergies, tracking down the causes of a recurring rash, gaining control of your stress and anxiety responses, or training your mind to focus better, your best and most often used tool is going to be an easily and totally recallable continuous physiological e-memory.

TOTAL RECALL
    I hate to lose my memories. I want Total Recall.
    This isn’t a pipe dream. I know that three streams of technology advancement—recording, storage, and sophisticated recall—have already launched the beginning of the Total Recall era. It is absolutely clear that by 2020 these streams of technology will have matured to give the complete Total Recall experience.
    I don’t work on anything unless I see a practical payoff. I got started in this by wanting to get rid of all the paper in my life. Then I wanted better recall; then a better story to leave to my grandchildren. Soon I became aware of potential benefits for my health, my studies, and even a sense of psychological well-being from decluttering both my physical space and my brain. As time passes, I become more and more excited about the benefits of Total Recall.
    As you read on about Total Recall, I’ll tell you more about my own story, and I’ll elaborate on the incredible gains that Total Recall will supply across so many areas of life. In the last section of the book, I’ll discuss how to put these ideas into practice, and explain how you can stop losing your mind and get started creating your own e-memories.

CHAPTER 2
    MYLIFEBITS
    My own quest for Total Recall began in 1998 while I was working as a researcher at Microsoft. I didn’t start out thinking of Total Recall. As usual, I was being pragmatic and looking for things to make my own life better. A colleague, Raj Reddy, asked me if he could digitize the books I had written and put them on the Web as part of his Million Books Project.
    “Sure,” I told him, “Microsoft has a lot of lawyers. They should be able to get me out of any trouble that comes from copyrights.”
    Seeing those books become digital felt good, and encouraged me to try some more scanning. I did the scanning myself just to see how to do it and whether it was interesting and useful. I scanned a pile of correspondence, patents, and around a hundred articles. I became even more upbeat, and set my sights on scanning all of my papers and notebooks. I saw it would declutter my office, and allow me to work from home or anywhere I happened to be. I could be an efficient, paperless teleworker.
    Then I thought: Why stop there? With all those cheap terabytes of storage coming down the pipe, why not just keep everything ? Not only books and papers and e-mails, but slide presentations, product brochures, health records,