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Memory Augmentation

Memory works in, as of yet, mysterious ways. We forget things a lot, misremember events and remember them differently with the passage of time. Memory is therefore unreliable. Memory augmentation, is the enhancing of memory. Humans do this constantly with setting up reminders and alarms, leaving each other notes, writing journals etc. While correlating the mental with the physical is something we recourse to almost naturally, a lot of theoretical as well as scientific study has been done in the area. From psychologists to scientists to technicians, various fields have explored the possibility of enhancing human cognition.

The process through which a human beings memory gets provided with information that helps him to recall past event is called memory augmentation. One example of technological intervention to enhance human memory is the famous proposal “Ubiquitous Memories”, which is a memory augmentation system that gets triggered by objects enables one to associate surrounding physical objects with experience data through “touching” operation. They suggest that a person can memorize and recollect experiential events previously stored in the object simple by touching the physical object. Though still limited to the theoretical, it opens a new field within human memory can be augmented by touch.

The origins of this technology lie in ancient methods which used surroundings to aid memory. The "memory palace" is an ancient Greek memory enhancing technique that could be used to aid memory. It can be used for complicated tasks such as remembering historical dates, numerals or foreign language words. Many memory contest champions, like Dominic O’Brien have claimed to have used this method. To use this technique, human mind is trained to correlate information that one wants to remember or one often forgets to real or imaginary images. While this may sound counter-intuitive and adding more burden to the memorizing process, it is not.

This is just one method to improve memorizing. However, while this can work very well to the extent that one develops a “photographic memory”, it is still a human process and hence, unreliable. While these methods can be employed by a human even without the help of technology, a lot of proposed methods premise on infiltrating the space of the human mind artificially to capture the past and the current. Technology offers methods by which human memory is cultivated and stored in processors, making it external to the workings of the human mind and hence, more objectively accurate.

Lately, attention was paid on processing meetings’ content for later use as well, such as revisiting a meeting for keeping in mind key issues, supporting failing memories, verification, etc. This is because these meetings are essential for knowledge sharing in organizations. Crestani and Bahrainia have proposed four time-series methods to predict those topics that a person could use to prepare the next meeting. Those recommended topics could see by one to be a memory augmentation that helped the recall of the key points of the prior meeting. With the increasing meetings in an organization that a person may attend every week and with the increasing topics discussed, letting go the memory of the previous meetings becomes important, hence suggesting those topics to a person to prepare him for a later meeting is beneficial (Crestani and Bahrainian, 2018). The experimental results about the real-world data reveal that these methods outperform a Hidden Markov Model baseline.

Memory augmentations has interested those but is not working to prove this a reality. It has carved its own niche in science fiction lovers. Black Mirror episode "Entire History of You" is based in a universe where memory augmentation is a reality. It is a portrayal of how such objective recollection could destroy relationships and family life. While overtly a tool to enhance human life experiences, could prove to be dangerous with time.