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The interface between the physical world and the digital world seems to be blurring, and becoming less determinate. It has long been recognised that the interaction between technology and human society can have far-reaching psychological effects. Thinkers as early as Socrates and Plato focused on memory as one faculty of mind for which technologies of storage could change individuals’ psychological makeup, by, so to speak, externalising or ‘outsourcing’ mental function. In recent years, the development of such commonplace innovations as email, ubiquitous computing (including the internet), virtual reality and advanced prosthetics have brought home the requirement for an increase in the scientific and social understanding of cognitive function, in order to design and evaluate appropriate technological devices.

Memory is by no means the only relevant area for interaction at the interface of the mind and the digital, but it is a very exciting one, as evinced by the impressive convergence evident from research reviews commissioned by the United Kingdom’s Cognitive Systems Foresight programme. The ability to co-opt electronic media for the storage of personally-relevant information gives rise to the notion of Memories for Life (M4L), currently being discussed as a ‘Grand Challenge’ for computing, to define and solve the problems caused by people storing increasingly large quantities of information about themselves.

Why M4L? Why Now?

M4L is a research problem, and a problem space – but what problem, and why now? The use of electronic media for supporting human information storage and recall needs defines an area. We have always had artificial aids to memory of course; the 21st century twist is that suddenly we are presented with the possibility of memories for life.

Paper survives, but not predictably. Our knowledge of daily life in Ancient Egypt, for instance, stems largely from the accidental survival of certain papyri from various rubbish tips; we have no idea whether these agreements, letters, wills, accounts and charms are representative or not of social and business life in Hellenistic Egypt. We can doubt whether the Egyptians themselves, who of course cared deeply about posterity, would have selected these papyri had they been commissioned to set up a time capsule. But the use of digital and electronic media moves information storage on from paper; survival can now be managed.

How Much Memory for a Life?

It is now possible to store digital versions of life’s memories. As Alan Dix playfully noted, it takes 100 kbits/second to get high quality audio and video. If we imagine someone with a camera strapped to his or her head for 70 years (2.2 × 109 seconds), that is something of the order of 27.5 terabytes of storage required, or about 450 60gb iPods. And if Moore’s Law continues to hold over those 70 years (admittedly a large assumption!), it would be possible to store a continuous record of a life on a grain of sand.

Of course, memory storage is unlikely to be continuous over a lifetime, but it could be very rich. The variety of information captured varies between the home and the workplace, and ranges from documents and emails to digital photographs, video and so on. The ‘information overload’ problem, long recognised in the computing industry, is becoming a major issue in the workplace for everyone and for the private citizen too, as retrieving and selectively deleting (forgetting) these data becomes ever more of a challenge. And the challenge is now directly related to our conception of ourselves, as the information we collect is increasingly generated by us, not by outside observing bodies. The information will have some sort of role in defining our identities, over a lifetime.

M4L is Interdisciplinary

In this space, interdisciplinarity is crucial. The issues of storage, retrieval and forgetting have analogies across a range of sciences, and yet these analogies are by no means fully understood. For instance, in cognitive psychology, the problem of understanding selective attention – the processing by which an abundance of sensory information impinging upon us is filtered to enable a manageable flow of information for the brain to handle has been studied for many years. But how many of the insights that have come from this work have had an impact on the design of operating systems used in desktop PCs?

At a minimum, the M4L research programme will require input from mechanistic studies of the brain (neuroscience), the human mind (cognitive psychology), the structures and limitations imposed by human society and human social behaviour (sociology), information technology (computer science) and management (knowledge management). Of course, this is not an exhaustive list of relevant disciplines of those who can contribute. The Memories for Life network contains scientists from these disciplines and more.

From Analogy to Interaction

But how can we move from analogy and metaphor (different ways of understanding ‘memory’) to concrete two way interaction between disciplines? M4L may or may not end up as a recognised subdiscipline, but what seems inevitable is that the various disciplines, all looking at memory, understood differently, with different methods and jargons, will move towards each other as scientists begin to understand each other’s languages and methodologies. The first stage will be converging understanding of the problem space (convergence of language and method); a second stage will be learning from results in different disciplines (for instance, computing memory ‘borrowing’ structures from psychology, such as working memory and long-term memory). The third stage of interaction will be closing feedback loops and genuinely collaborating. We are, hopefully, well on the way to achieving stage one. And the prizes for going beyond this stage are great.

Analogous to the switch from orality to literacy centuries ago, the digital revolution gives rise to momentous opportunities. For instance, the existence of large quantities of multimedia information recorded from a life may benefit from research to integrate information from distinct media to create a narrative of events that may be of value to a person’s descendents. Intelligent querying of large data stores, mapping of deep structures in such stores, and development of user models are some examples of important technical challenges that present themselves immediately, issues being confronted by the research teams developing the Semantic Web. Analysing stored information to model a person’s lifestyle (with potential commercial implications in the insurance and security industries), behaviour and health (the “virtual general practitioner”), or intelligent web pages that can adapt themselves to a person’s linguistic and other competence are examples of more ambitious applications that we might look forward to in the coming decades. Developing prosthetic memories for those with impaired cognitive function may seem too far fetched to be worthy of discussion, yet projects with precisely this in mind are currently underway.