Using Technology to Outsource Human Memory

The Atlantic:

Nostalgia has made a comeback.

With all the #tbts and #fbfs—also known as Throwback Thursdays and Flashback Fridays—as well as that NewsFeed-topping Year in Review feature on Facebook, social networks seem intent on making its users remember the past. Even food-ordering app Seamless got in on the action late last year, sending out emails that relayed the (grimace-inducing) data of how many times users ordered Chinese takeout, probably at too late of hours.

There’s also Timehop, described as “#tbt every day,” which pulls a user’s social-media posts, tweets, and pictures from the same day a year or multiple years before to create a handy virtual time capsule that’s ready to be shared with others. Timehop cofounder Jonathan Wegener says the app has 14 million users, about half of which check the app every single day.

That, he likes to say, is more than the number of people who read The New York Times each day.

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Of course, this isn’t the first time people are practicing and embracing nostalgia—it is, in fact, a fundamental human practice. As long as there have been cameras, there have been ways to develop photographs and keep them; as long as people made journals, they kept accounts of their experiences to relive them. “We do often feel that we are traveling back in time and revisiting the original event,” Elizabeth Kensinger, a professor of psychology at Boston College, says about looking back at our memories.

Much of the way humans process and record experiences has to do with our body chemistry—our brains, even while experiencing an event, are already preparing to remember it. “There is much overlap between the brain processes that occur when we initially experience an event and when we later remember that event,” Kensinger explained via email.

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The hippocampus, part of that medial temporal lobe, is especially responsible for piecing our memories together, according to Linda Henkel, a psychology professor at Fairfield University in Connecticut who specializes in memory errors and distortions. “It takes the separate pieces of our memories and kind of glues them together in a way,” she says. For example, when speaking with someone, “I have auditory information, visual information, all kinds of things—but my memory is a coherent whole. I don’t just [think] ‘Oh here’s the voice, and here’s what you look like.’ I kind of glue those things together.”

Read the whole story: The Atlantic