Next I talked to a spokesperson from Whetstone, Erica Meyers. For a while she gave me a typically corporate spiel about the benefits of Remem. “Making information more accessible is an intrinsic good,” she said. “Ubiquitous video has revolutionized law enforcement. Businesses become more effective when they adopt good record-keeping practices. The same thing happens to us as individuals when our memories become more accurate: we get better, not just at doing our jobs, but at living our lives.”
When I asked her about couples like Joel and Deirdre, she said, “If your marriage is solid, Remem isn’t going to hurt it. But if you’re the type of person who’s constantly trying to prove that you’re right and your spouse is wrong, then your marriage is going to be in trouble whether you use Remem or not.”
I conceded that she may have a point in this particular case. But, I asked her, didn’t she think Remem created greater opportunities for those types of arguments to arise, even in solid marriages, by making it easier for people to keep score?
“Not at all,” she said. “Remem didn’t give them a scorekeeping mentality; they developed that on their own. Another couple could just as easily use Remem to realize that they’ve both misremembered things and become more forgiving when that sort of mistake happens. I predict the latter scenario will be the more common one with our customers as a whole.”
I wished I could share Erica Meyers’s optimism, but I knew that new technology doesn’t always bring out the best in people. Who hasn’t wished they could prove that their version of events was the correct one? I could easily see myself using Remem the way Deirdre did, and I wasn’t at all certain that doing so would be good for me. Anyone who has wasted hours surfing the Internet knows that technology can encourage bad habits.
Moseby gave a sermon every seven days, on the day devoted to resting and brewing and drinking beer. He seemed to disapprove of the beer drinking, but he didn’t want to speak on one of the days of work, so the day of beer brewing was the only one left. He talked about the European god and told people that following his rules would improve their lives, but his explanations of how that would do so weren’t particularly persuasive.
But Moseby also had some skill at dispensing medicine, and he was willing to learn how to work in the fields, so gradually people grew more accepting of him, and Jijingi’s father let him visit Moseby occasionally to learn the art of writing. Moseby offered to teach the other children as well, and for a time Jijingi’s age-mates came along, mostly to prove to one another that they weren’t afraid of being near a European. Before long the other boys grew bored and left, but because Jijingi remained interested in writing, and his father thought it would keep the Europeans happy, he was eventually permitted to go every day.
Moseby explained to Jijingi how each sound a person spoke could be indicated with a different mark on the paper. The marks were arranged in rows like plants in a field; you looked at the marks as if you were walking down a row, made the sound each mark indicated, and you would find yourself speaking what the original person had said. Moseby showed him how to make each of the different marks on a sheet of paper, using a tiny wooden rod that had a core of soot.
In a typical lesson, Moseby would speak and then write what he had said: “When night comes I shall sleep.” Tugh mba a ile yo me yav. “There are two persons.” Ioruv mban mba uhar. Jijingi carefully copied the writing on his sheet of paper, and when he was done, Moseby would look at his paper.
“Very good. But you need to leave spaces when you write.”
“I have.” Jijingi pointed at the gap between each row.
“No, that is not what I mean. Do you see the spaces within each line?” He pointed at his own paper.
Jijingi understood. “Your marks are clumped together, while mine are arranged evenly.”
“These are not just clumps of marks. They are…I do not know what you call them.” He picked up a thin sheaf of paper from his table and flipped through it. “I do not see it here. Where I come from, we call them ‘words.’ When we write, we leave spaces between the words.”
“But what are words?”
“How can I explain it?” He thought a moment. “If you speak slowly, you pause very briefly after each word. That’s why we leave a space in those places when we write. Like this: How. Many. Years. Old. Are. You?” He wrote on his paper as he spoke, leaving a space every time he paused: Anyom a ou kuma a me?
“But you speak slowly because you’re a foreigner. I’m Tiv, so I don’t pause when I speak. Shouldn’t my writing be the same?”
“It does not matter how fast you speak. Words are the same whether you speak quickly or slowly.”
“Then why did you say you pause after each word?”
“That is the easiest way to find them. Try saying this very slowly.” He pointed at what he’d just written.
Jijingi spoke very slowly, the way a man might when trying to hide his drunkenness. “Why is there no space in between an and yom?”
“Anyom is one word. You do not pause in the middle of it.”
“But I wouldn’t pause after anyom either.”
Moseby sighed. “I will think more about how to explain what I mean. For now, just leave spaces in the places where I leave spaces.”
What a strange art writing was. When sowing a field, it was best to have the seed yams spaced evenly; Jijingi’s father would have beaten him if he’d clumped the yams the way Moseby clumped his marks on paper. But he had resolved to learn this art as best he could, and if that meant clumping his marks, he would do so.
It was only many lessons later that Jijingi finally understood where he should leave spaces and what Moseby meant when he said “word.” You could not find the places where words began and ended by listening. The sounds a person made while speaking were as smooth and unbroken as the hide of a goat’s leg, but the words were like the bones underneath the meat, and the space between them was the joint where you’d cut if you wanted to separate it into pieces. By leaving spaces when he wrote, Moseby was making visible the bones in what he said.
Jijingi realized that, if he thought hard about it, he was now able to identify the words when people spoke in an ordinary conversation. The sounds that came from a person’s mouth hadn’t changed, but he understood them differently; he was aware of the pieces from which the whole was made. He himself had been speaking in words all along. He just hadn’t known it until now.
The ease of searching that Remem provides is impressive enough, but that merely scratches the surface of what Whetstone sees as the product’s potential. When Deirdre fact-checked her husband’s previous statements, she was posing explicit queries to Remem. But Whetstone expects that, as people become accustomed to their product, queries will take the place of ordinary acts of recall, and Remem will be integrated into their very thought processes. Once that happens, we will become cognitive cyborgs, effectively incapable of misremembering anything; digital video stored on error-corrected silicon will take over the role once filled by our fallible temporal lobes.
What might it be like to have a perfect memory? Arguably the individual with the best memory ever documented was Solomon Shereshevskii, who lived in Russia during the first half of the twentieth century. The psychologists who tested him found that he could hear a series of words or numbers once and remember it months or even years later. With no knowledge of Italian, Shereshevskii was able to quote stanzas of The Divine Comedy that had been read to him fifteen years earlier.