When We Are No More

by Abby Smith Rumsey

11 “the progressive post-encoding stabilization of the memory trace”: Science of Memory, 165.

  12 memory is most vulnerable: “During that phase, but not afterwards, the memory item is susceptible to amnestic agents.” Ibid., 165.

  13 analog and digital circuits: O’Reilly, “Biologically Based Computational Models”; and Eisenberg, “What’s Next.”

  14 “It is clear that the brain is much more”: O’Reilly “Biologically Based Computational Models,” 94.

  15 emotions are associated with our senses: Dolan, “Emotion, Cognition, and Behavior.”

  16 “Pure emotion can be viewed”: Greenfield, The Private Life of the Brain, 21.

  17 “without requiring any conscious memory content”: Kandel and Squire, “Neuroscience.”

  18 directed attention requires effort: True, we can make choices about where to direct our thoughts. We can decide to focus on what the woman behind the counter is saying in response to our question; we can choose between red wine versus white with pork or among various cable subscription plans, including none at all. We can direct our thoughts to coordinating muscles and synchronizing our breathing as we practice our backhand stroke. We can memorize a tune, a poem, or a string of numbers. But that concentration, no matter how great the effort to sustain, represents a small fraction of the brain’s activities. If, during any of these acts of forced concentration and exercise of working memory, we were to hear a loud noise, feel a wave of concussed air, and smell something acrid, we would immediately turn our attention to figuring what caused the noise, locate where it came from, and scan our environs for an escape route from the fire.

  19 “Emotion exerts a powerful influence on reason”: Dolan sees emotion as “states that index occurrences of value.” See “Emotion, Cognition, and Behavior,” 1191.

  20 empathy and fellow feeling: Pronin, “How We See Ourselves and How We See Others.”

  21 as he lay still under the covers: Luria, Mnemonist, 151.

  22 the word for beetle, zhuk: Ibid., 83–84. He went on to mention a lump of coal, the splash made when his grandmother was pouring tea, unmelted tallow, and so on.

  23 the sheer density of sensory associations: The proliferation of unedited, unconsolidated associations bears similarity to certain features of autism, see p. 128.

  24 “convert encounters with the particular”: Jerome S. Bruner, foreword to the first edition of Luria, Mnemonist, xxii.

  25 “This makes for a tremendous amount of conflict”: Luria, Mnemonist, 116.

  26 “to weigh one’s words”: Ibid., 119. “And take the expression to weigh one’s words. Now how can you weigh words? When I hear the word weigh, I see a large scale—like the one we had in Rezhitsa in our shop, where they put the bread on one side and the weight on the other. The arrow shifts to one side, then stops in the middle … But what do you have here—to weigh one’s words!” In the original Russian text, the examples I use for “arm” are given as uses of the word ruchka to mean “child’s arm,” “door handle,” or “penholder.”

  27 he had a hard time remembering faces: Ibid., 64.

  28 “At one point I studied the stock market”: Ibid., 157.

  29 “I was passive for the most part”: Ibid., 157.

  30 “living pasts and dead pasts”: Le Corbusier, “When the Cathedrals Were White: Journey to the Country of Timid People.” quoted in New York Times Magazine, November 11, 2001, p. 23.

  CHAPTER EIGHT: IMAGINATION: MEMORY IN THE FUTURE TENSE

  1 “How do our minds get so much”: Tenenbaum et al., “How to Grow a Mind,” 1279.

  2 “Great is this power of memory”: Augustine, Confessions, 197.

  3 cognitive disorders such as autism: Guomei Tang et al., “Loss of mTOR-Dependent Macroautophagy Causes Autistic-like Synaptic Pruning Deficits,” Neuron 83: 994–96. The discovery’s implications for future treatments is the subject of an article by Pam Belluck, “Study Finds That Brains with Autism Fail to Trim Synapses as They Develop,” New York Times, August 21, 2014.

  4 children can notice correlations: Keil, “Science Starts Early,” 1022.

  5 tasks do not require deep temporal depth perception: Ball, “Cellular memory”; Balter “‘Killjoys’ Challenge Claims”; and Kagan, “The uniquely human in human nature” summarize some of the doubts raised about identifying human skills too closely with animal behaviors.

  6 “combine images and experiences”: Balter, “Can Animals Envision the Future?”

  7 “daily pucker of blank anxiety”: Bayley, Elegy, 63–64.

  8 “in humans, the ability to imagine future events”: Shettleworth, “Planning for breakfast,” 826. See also Daniel L. Schacter et al., “Remembering the past”

  9 it began in the First World War: Although today well known in the Second World War, the strategy came into common, if less systematic, use in the first days of World War I. See Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau and Annette Becker, 14–18: Understanding the Great War, trans. Catherine Temerson (New York: Hill and Wang, 2002) chaps. 1–3.

  10 National and University Library of Bosnia and Herzegovina: Of the 200,000 manuscripts, maps, personal archives, and pictures in the library’s special collections, only 19,700 were recovered after the fire. See the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions information at www.ifla.org/news/20-years-later-the-national-and-university-library-of-bosnia-and-herzegovina.

  11 “life is elsewhere”: Kundera’s book, Life Is Elsewhere, was published in 1973.

  CHAPTER NINE: MASTERING MEMORY IN THE DIGITAL AGE

  1 “our brains are the ultimate general-purpose organ”: Tattersall, Masters, 228.

  2 “Google Effects on Memory”: Sparrow et al., “Google Effects on Memory.” Tellingly, when people search for information they know is stored elsewhere, they recall where the information is stored.

  3 Twitter archive at the Library of Congress: For news of the donation and terms of use, see “Update on the Twitter Archive at the Library of Congress,” issued in January 2013. http://blogs.loc.gov/loc/2013/01/update-on-the-twitter-archive-at-the-library-of-congress/.

  4 “More important than technical approaches”: McCarthy, “Reflections On,” 1645.

  5 the results are easily gamed: The Federal Trade Commission found Google “manipulated search results to favor its own services over rivals’, even when they weren’t most relevant for users.” Rolfe Winkler and Brody Mullins, “How Google Skewed Search Results,” Wall Street Journal, March 19, 2015.

  6 slow and fast thinking: The ability to move beyond instinctual reactions and make conscious choices is what Daniel Kahneman discusses in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow, in which he draws a distinction between one system of thought that is reflexive, instinctual, intuitive, and fast and a more deliberative, effortful, conscious system of thinking.

  7 “Organizations are better”: Ibid., 417–18.

  8 skills to control our personal information: For a summary of essential digital good housekeeping, see Leslie Johnston, “Am I a Good Steward of My Own Digital Life?” The Signal, December 12, 2013. http://blogs.loc.gov/digitalpreservation/2013/12/am-i-a-good-steward-of-my-own-life/.

  9 conversion of ships’ logs: Schrope, “The Real Sea Change.”

  10 collections of human and animal tissue samples: The Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, for example, is the largest repository of its kind in the world. With nearly ninety million tissue samples, it includes “some of the most rare and difficult cases” in the history of medicine and is used by pathologists for diagnosis and categorization of disease. Despite the fact that it is a gold mine for genetic analysis and historical data about disease, it has been repeatedly subject to budget cuts by the Department of Defense and threatened with closure. Alison McCook, “Shelved.”

  11 natural history museum specimen collections: Kemp, “The endangered dead.”

  12 the Avian Phylogenomics Project: http://avian.genomics.cn/en/; Kress, “Valuing Collections,” 1310.

  13 glass plate negatives: Bh
attacharjee, “Stars in Dusty Filing Cabinets.”

  14 the first recording made in 1860: The oldest known recording is a “phonautogram” made in France of a singer performing “Au Clair de Lune.” When the creator, Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville, made it in 1860, there was no playback equipment yet, so he never heard what he had recorded. To hear the restoration made by Carl Haber and Earl Cornell, see Jody Rosen, “Researchers Play Tune Recorded Before Edison,” New York Times, March 27, 2008.

  15 imaging the tracks of subatomic particles: Personal communication from Carl Haber.

  16 IRENE: http://irene.lbl.gov/. Carl Haber’s groundbreaking work on sound recovery is being developed for use in libraries and archives and won him the MacArthur “genius award” in 2013. Lou Fancher, “Berkeley Lab’s Carl Haber: A Genius in Our Midst,” Berkeleyside, December 16, 2013.

  17 possibilities for the extraction of information: In addition, mining databases about physical collections allows preservationists “to predict behaviors of collection materials and treatments based on characterization of these materials by non-invasive or optical methods.” See the Library of Congress Preservation Directorate’s website. http://www.loc.gov/preservation/outreach/tops/strlic_dahlberg/index.html.

  18 preserving creative content: For fuller discussion about creative content, as well as scholarly, scientific, and open web content, see Sustainable Economics.

  19 exemptions for libraries and archives: Section 108 of the U.S. copyright law grants to libraries and archives exemptions from copyright protection for preservation purposes. The institutions are allowed to make copies of items in their collections—books, photographs, LPs, and so forth—in order to preserve the content. This means that when a book still under copyright is full of acidic pages that are crumbling, the library or archives can make a microfilm, digital copy, or photocopy of the book in order to provide continued access to the content. This exemption applies to analog-based materials, and needs to be updated for the digital world, in which, technically speaking, every time someone brings up a digital file from the hard drive, it is a “copy.” In March 2008, a report sponsored by the U.S. Copyright Office and the Library of Congress made recommendations to address the outstanding impediments to preserving born-digital content. See “The Section 108 Study Group Report” at www.section108.gov/docs/Sec108StudyGroupReport.pdf.

  Most of the recommendations remain to be implemented. In a similar vein, another section of the copyright code allows libraries to purchase physical copies of copyrighted material and lend them for limited periods of time to their patrons. This first-sale doctrine also allows people to give their legally-purchased books to others and used bookstores to sell books. They are selling a copy of the book, not the underlying copyright of the content.

  20 economic and commercial value of content: For a detailed analysis of economic models for digital data preservation, see Sustainable Economics.

  21 micropayments: See, for example, Jaron Lanier’s book Who Owns the World? New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013.

  22 September 11 Archive: An overview of the September 11 Archive is available on the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media website at: http://chnm.gmu.edu/the-september-11-digital-archive/; and on the Library of Congress website at: http://lcweb2.loc.gov/diglib/lcwa/html/sept11/sept11-overview.html.

  23 Internet Archive: The Internet Archive collects materials from the web through an automated system called harvesting. The method of the archive is to sample segments of the digital universe, taking captures of websites from time to time in a mode similar to telescopes dedicated to surveying deep space. The captures themselves are interactive: A site is navigable and its videos can be played, for example.

  24 international consortium to coordinate to coordinate digital collecting: The alliance is the International Internet Preservation Consortium, http://netpreserve.org/.

  CHAPTER TEN: BY MEMORY OF OURSELVES

  1 former NSA scientist said that staff: Julia Angwin, “NSA Struggles to Make Sense of Surveillance Data.” Wall Street Journal, December 25, 2013.

  2 “Our tendency to construct”: Kahneman, Thinking, 218.

  3 “devised a system that encapsulates”: “Long-term storage in DNA,” 276.

  4 the limit to storage on silicon: As Nature recently reported, Moore’s law predicting the doubling of memory component storage every two years is now reaching its physical limits. “More from Moore,” Nature 5, April 23, 2015, 408.

  5 “It makes Google’s search problems”: “The human brain produces in 30 seconds as much data as the Hubble Space Telescope has produced in its lifetime.” Konrad Kording, quoted in Abbott, “Solving the Brain,” 274. The BRAIN Initiative was funded in 2013 and allocated one hundred million dollars to start. The same year the EC announced its decade-long Human Brain Project with first year funding of €54M ($69M).

  6 one cubic millimeter of brain tissue generates two thousand terabytes of data: For a quick and daunting overview of imaging parts of the brain, see Harvard University’s Research Computing calculations at https://rc.fas.harvard.edu/case-studies/connections-in-the-brain/; and http://theastronomist.fieldofscience.com/2011/07/cubic-millimeter-of-your-brain.html.

  7 “20 petabytes of data”: Information provided by Wendy Hanamura. Top 250 sites: www.alexa.com/siteinfo/archive.org.

  8 following links from Wikipedia: www.alexa.com/topsites.

  9 study from 2013: AlNoamany et al., “Who and What Links to the Internet Archive,” 11.

  10 Long Now Foundation projects: http://longnow.org/projects/.

  11 “there is nothing more deceptive”: Doyle, “The Boscombe Valley Mystery” in The Complete Original Illustrated Sherlock Holmes.

  12 “to link the molecular”: Dudai, “A Journey to Remember,” 157.

  13 “This shift is usually described”: Laughlin, A Different Universe, 76.

  14 the company spent twenty-one billion dollars on data centers: www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2013/09/17/google-has-spent-21-billion-on-data-centers/. Now that Google Cloud Platform is competing with Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, and IBM for corporate data analysis and other cloud services, it is more open about its computing capacity, including data back-up. See Quentin Hardy, “Google is Its Own Secret Weapon in the Cloud,” New York Times, June 1, 2015.

  15 “the great obstacle to good education”: Jefferson in a letter to Nathaniel Burwell, March 14, 1818, quoted in Sowerby, IV: 433 and using his characteristically casual spelling and punctuation. “when this poison infects the mind, it destroys it’s [sic] tone, and revolts it against wholsome reading. reason and fact, plain and unadorned are rejected. nothing can engage attention unless dressed in all the figments of fancy; and nothing so bedecked comes amiss. the result is a bloated imagination, sickly judgment, and disgust towards all the real business of life.”

  16 a mere 20 percent of his books: Sowerby lists 4,930 titles of which 757 fall under the Fine Arts. (Her entry numbers are by title, not individual volumes.) The Fine Arts category featured Jefferson’s greatest passion, building. He had books on architectural history, theory, and engineering, especially books by and about his idol Palladio, mixed in liberally with treatises on building design and construction. He also included collections on gardening, painting, sculpture; there were musical scores (he played the violin and his daughter the keyboard); and a smattering of literary forms from poetry and drama to didactic works. He collected books on logic, from Aristotle to Condillac, compendia of exemplary sermons, political speeches, essays on tragedy and comedy, illustrated travel books—all categorized under Fine Arts. But the architect and general contractor of Monticello was a practical futurist, giving pride of place to his copious books on building and landscapes. Jefferson predicted that the population would double every twenty years and Americans would need to build lots of houses.

  17 “I know of nothing so pleasant”: Lincoln in his Address before the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society, Milwaukee, September 30, 1859. http://riley
.nal.usda.gov/nal_display/index.php?info_center=8&tax_level=4&tax_subject=3&topic_id=1030&level3_id=6723&level4_id=11085.

  18 “is perfectible to a degree”: “I am among those who think well of the human character generally. I consider man as formed for society, and endowed by nature with those dispositions which fit him for society. I believe also, with Condorcet … that his mind is perfectible to a degree of which we cannot as yet form any conception. It is impossible for a man who takes a survey of what is already known, not to see what an immensity in every branch of science yet remains to be discovered, & that too of articles to which our faculties seem adequate.” Jefferson in a letter to William Green Munford, June 18, 1799.

  19 “Science fixes our attention”: Jasanoff, “Technologies of humility,” 33.

  20 “Science addresses what is true”: Weinberg, “Reductionism Redux.”

  21 “The historical process”: Berlin, Russian Thinkers, 98.

  SELECTED SOURCES

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