Memory and forgetting in the digital age
Yadin Dudai writes in the New Scientist on two books on memory and forgetting in the digital age — Total Recall: How the e-memory revolution will change everything by Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmell, and Delete: The virtue of forgetting in the digital age by Viktor Mayer-Schönberger — and concludes:
“For the human condition, forgetting is at least as important as remembering – sometimes more so. Without it, we are all bound to lead the miserable life of A. R. Luria’s patient Solomon Shereshevsky, who was crippled by his boundless, indelible memory, or his fictional counterpart, Jorge Luis Borges’s Funes. No forgetting implies no generalisation, no real present time, no amelioration of trauma, and no weaving of meaningful life narratives.”
