Creeva’s World 2.0

I was going through and orga­niz­ing my flickr photo’s and look­ing at quite a few of the pic­tures of when I was grow­ing up.   I was say­ing to myself dur­ing dif­fer­ent times “that was the day that such and such hap­pen”.   Now pho­tographs have always been a door­way into our past, a visual rep­re­sen­ta­tion that can spell things out bet­ter then our own mem­ory can some­times.   It can also jog our thoughts and remem­ber that spe­cific with bet­ter clar­ity then what you can describe with the writ­ten or vocal.   So how many pic­tures would it take to give your­self a near rep­re­sen­ta­tive pho­to­graphic mem­ory?  This is the ques­tion that I’ve posed to myself.

We throw out things like sit­ting by your­self watch­ing TV or star­ing at a com­puter mon­i­tor and there goes a few hours of the (for argu­ment and since I’m an IT guy) we’ll say that eats up 9 hours of a week­day.   If you keep all your emails you’ll recover most those days any­way if you are so inter­ested.   That leaves 5 hours left in the day, if we say you take a pic­ture of the right key moments every 15 min­utes — that leaves you with 20 pic­tures of that day.    Would those 20 pic­tures be enough to remind you of that spe­cific day for the rest of your life?   What if you did  this every day?  Would you be able to remem­ber your life com­pletely from your ear­li­est mem­o­ries until the end?   Going back ear­lier then age 4 the mem­o­ries are mostly lost in the time of age.   I think though at age 4 and up I remem­ber most the days and cir­cum­stances that pic­tures were taken (with the excep­tion of school and stu­dio pictures).

Now other peo­ple are doing this to some extent, some are using video and some are blog­ging about it.   Both of these I think are inef­fi­cient.   Look­ing through hours of video to find a moment takes just that, hours to search through.   Even a blog or diary will take a lit­tle bit to search through posts and nar­row down what you are look­ing for.   20 pic­tures, you can take only a few sec­onds and see all of them which may or may not give you a quick reminder.   Pic­tures give you that pri­mal visual con­nec­tion with­out the wasted time.   It’s some­thing for you, while videos would be for oth­ers and writ­ing it down would just be muddy.

The only prob­lem I could see that has not been tested, how long and how unique mem­o­ries can you han­dle?  So would you being will­ing to do this?  What is your mem­ory and your abil­ity to recall worth to you?