Wednesday, January 8th

The Daily Report

I keep having the urge to start these with things like "I had an astonishingly good day" or "I'm having a phenomenally good week", and then re-thinking it, because in the grand scale of things my days this week have been kind of middle of the road. An astonishingly good day is when I get a sudden influx of money or I write ten or twenty thousand words I wasn't expecting.

Yesterday was my major writing day for the next chapter and I ended up with a little shy of 2000 words, which is what I consider sprinting distance to the finish line, as long as the shape of the chapter is there (and it is). A great day would have been that I finished writing the chapter yesterday, so all I had to today was give it a polish pass before I publish it.

But here's why I think these average days feel so good to me: I don't usually get average days. My average days only exist as an average. My days are like the reviews of a 3 star movie on Amazon: strongly clustered around 1 star and 5 star.

And I know these are not one star days. I know what a one star day feels like, and this isn't it. So must be a pretty great day then, right? It feels good to be hitting targets and getting things done.

All of which fills me with hope that I'm not just hitting my stride here, but hitting a sustainable stride. Like, I don't think this heralds the End of Bad Days or anything like that, but it might be a nice transition to the occasional stumble instead of the inevitable crash and burn.

In less introspective but vaguer news... I wrote (another) thing yesterday that might turn into (another) thing, and that thing might have something to do with Star Harbor. The thing I wrote last week that is turning into a thing has started updating, though there's only one more entry between now and Monday, which is when it starts in earnest.

The State of the Me

Doing pretty good. Nothing to really report. It has of course been unusually cold here, but quite a bit warmer than it would be in Nebraska.

Plans For Today

I'm going to be doing another PDF conversion this morning... at the rate of one book a day, everything should be available in PDF by the end of the week, which means I will be able to close out all perk fulfillment relating to e-books (barring those folks who haven't yet told me what they want).

I'm starting to mentally divide my afternoon into two blocks... doing it hour by hour is too fragmented and choppy for creative work. The second block, from around 3:30 to around 6:30, is almost always going to belong to TOMU because that's when I hit my creative peak. The preceding block, from around 1 to around 3, is going to be more open. Today I'm going to spend a couple of hours on the thing from yesterday.

The Persistence of Memory

Today's xkcd strip brought a smile to my face because of personal associations, but it also put me in mind of a factoid making the rounds as fodder for the anti-selfie/anti-technology/anti-social media bandwagon: the idea that taking photos of things makes you less likely to remember them clearly.

The surface takeaway from this, according to those who wield it as an argument, is that the habit of taking pictures damages your memory or harms your ability to remember. Compare this to the similar lament that cellphones with address books have harmed our memory because we used to be able to remember dozens of strings of arbitrary numbers associated with people and places and now we don't.

Put it together, and it adds up to the idea that technology (and our reliance on it) is making us... well... less intelligent.

But here's a handy test for interrogating ideas like this: if something treats intelligence as a simple, linear quantity that one has more or less of, it's probably an oversimplification at best and just completely wrong-headed at worst.

I doubt that technology is actually making us worse at remembering things. It's just changing what and how we remember. Comparing how many phone numbers someone in the waning decades of the 20th century knew to how many phone numbers someone in the second decade of the 21st century knows is like comparing how many email addresses and URLs these same hypothetical people know.

And no, you don't have to know the URL of every site you visit regularly or the email address of everyone you correspond with... but, uh, the reason you don't is because you don't have to. Not because you couldn't.

I doubt that being able to call to mind arbitrary strings of numbers when you want to contact someone has anything to do with strengthening the memory in general. That is, I don't think that memorizing phone numbers is going to help you study for tests, or remember where you left your keys, or figure out what name goes with the face that's in front of you. Memorizing phone numbers is such a specific thing keyed to such a specific context. And on top of that, how many of us really knew all those phone numbers as opposed to had a reflexive/muscle memory knowledge of them? I know more than once I had to sit there and mime punching in a number I frequently dialed so I could see what it was in order to relay that information to someone else. I think a lot of people have had to do similar exercises to figure out passwords or pins.

But this picture thing... it seems pretty solid, doesn't it?

Well, I have questions about how well the test corresponds to actual practices. The study consisted of having the subjects take a picture of some objects, study some objects, and take a close-up picture of some detail of some other objects still.

That the objects they were charged with examining are the ones they remembered best should surprise no one. The fact that they remembered the whole of the objects they had to take a detail shot of better than the objects they only had to take a picture of demonstrates that the act of paying attention to a photographic subject as a photographic subject does help you to notice it, to take in details about it.

Imagine a similar test, with three groups: one who was told simply to study the objects, one who was told to study them and take photographs to document their observations, and one who was told to simply take photographs of the objects.

Which group do you think would end up with the clearest memories?

The study's architect arranged the test for a hypothesis of hers, but there are some unexamined assumptions behind that hypothesis:

"It occurred to me that people often whip out their cameras and cellphone cameras to capture a moment and were doing so almost mindlessly and missing what was happening right in front of them," she said.

Henkel believes that people experienced the “photo-taking impairment effect” because they had counted on the technology to store the experience, not their own mind.

“When people rely on technology to remember for them -- counting on the camera to record the event and thus not needing to attend to it fully themselves -- it can have a negative impact on how well they remember their experiences,” she said in the release.

Like the stick figure in the xkcd strip, she sees people recording an event and assumes that they're doing this instead of experiencing it, rather than as an aid to their experience.

The article goes on to say:

She pointed out that previous studies have shown that memory can be jogged by looking at photos, but only if the person peruses them -- not if they just keep the snapshots.

So not only is she passing judgment on what's going on in the heads of the people she sees, she's making assumptions about what happens later. These pictures just sit there, unperused. The snappers don't look back over them to select the best shots or crop them, they don't post them to their media streams and then talk about them with their friends, they don't have prints made, they don't scrapbook them... at no point do they look back at them.

I'll be honest, I've taken pictures and then forgot about them. It happens. But if I forgot about the picture, why would I have remembered the event? Forgetting the picture and forgetting the event are tied together, because the picture is part of the event. The difference is that if I took a picture for an event I forgot, that's a reminder I can stumble upon later.

I have a terrible visual memory to begin with. I use the camera on my phone to note what hotel room I'm in or where a car is parked in a parking lot. Weird thing, though: a lot of the time, I don't need to refer back to the photo. The act of stopping and focusing on this one thing long enough to take a picture creates an association for it in my mind.

It might be true that if we didn't have a camera at an event we wanted to remember and we focused our mental bandwidth 100% on finding details about it and committing them to memory, we'd remember more about that event... but I think we'd probably end up remembering fewer things over all, because that is exhausting.

The ubiquity of digital cameras in so many of our lives definitely changes the way we remember, sure. But saying it makes it worse--or even better--is a matter of perspective.