I wish I had a place in my brain were memories were kept, secure and reliably stored, as in a digital recording.
Instead, I have a strange, unreliable holographic mechanism in which what is recorded degrades if it is not consulted...but is also degraded if it is consulted frequently, its details tending to become replaced by imaginary ones, its blanks filled in with fragments of unrelated memories.
Some people have trained their memories for greater rigor, and others are supposedly born with a natural ability to recall minute details with precision. All I know is that I don't have such a memory. I have a fairly typical memory, one which fades and fuzzes and only contains fragments and shards as I look backward.
If I had a convenient implant, though -- if I could replace one or two of my skull bones or vertebrae with substitutes made of cross-linked diamond so they were simultaneously data storage cores and also harder and more resilient than natural bone (I might as well go for top-of-the line unobtainium) -- I would be able to store my memories in a reliable form and not have to count on the tricky, dubious phenomenon or epiphenomenon of human memory.
I would be something different from human in that case. Would I be better or worse? I do think I would be better. If I had possessed such a memory, I would have been able to avoid many of the confusions, doubts and torments that plagued my life, at work and in private. I could have avoided many traps and follies that resulted from distortions of memory, including some which I seem to have manufactured intentionally.
One day, people will have the option to improve their memories with this sort of technology. At first it will be used to help people with severe disabilities. Eventually, it will be available to everyone. Yes, I do wish it were available now. Oh, well.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/42548/wasteful-gesture-only-not
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