I was delighted when I found this video, where James May (the cerebral third of Top Gear) talks to professor Alan Smeaton of Dublin City University about lifelogging – the recording of everything that happens to a person over a period of time, coupled with the construction of tools for making sense of the data.

In this example, James May wears a Sensecam for three days. The camera records everything he does (well, not everything, I assume – if you want privacy, you can always stick it inside your sweater) by taking a picture every 30 seconds, or when something (temperature, IR rays in front (indicating a person) or GPS location) changes. As it is said in the video, some people have been wearing these cameras for years – in fact, one of my pals from the iAD project, Cathal Gurrin, has worn one for at least three years. (He wore it the first time we met, where it snapped a picture of me with my hand outstretched.)

The software demonstrated in the video groups the pictures into events, by comparing the pictures to each other. Of course, many of the pictures can be discarded in the interest of brevity – for instance, for anyone working in an office and driving to work, many of the pictures will be of two hands on a keyboard or a steering wheel, and can be discarded. But the rest remains, and with powerful computers you can spin through your day and see what you did on a certain date.

And here is the thing: This means that you will increasingly have the option of never forgetting anything again. You know how it is – you may have forgotten everything about some event, and then something – a smell, a movement, a particular color – makes you remember by triggering whatever part (or, more precisely, which strands of your intracranial network) of your brain this particular memory is stored. Memory is associative, meaning that if we have a few clues, we can access whatever is in there, even though it had been forgotten.

Now, a set of pictures taken at 30-second intervals, coupled together in an easy-to-use and powerful interface, that is a rather powerful aide-de-memoire.

Forgetting, however, is done for a purpose – to allow you to concentrate on what you are doing rather than using spare brain cycles in constant upkeep of enormous, but unimportant memories. For this system to be effective, I assume it would need to be helpful in forgetting as well as remembering – and since it would be stored, you would actually not have to expend so much remember things – given a decent interface, you could always look it up again, much as we look things up in a notebook.

Think about that – remembering everything – or, at least being able to recall it at will. Useful – or an unnecessary distraction?