have Joshua Foer with us. Josh is a science journalist whose work has appeared in National

Geographic, Esquire, Slate, Outside, The New York Times, and many other publications.

His first book Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything

chronicles his journey of going from being a guy with just an average memory to becoming

the 2006 U.S. Memory Champion capable of memorizing a deck of cards in a minute and forty seconds.

Joshua is co-founder of Atlas Obscura an online guide to the world's wonders and curiosities

and is also co-founder of the design competition, Sukkah City.

Please join me in welcoming Joshua.

[applause]

>>Joshua Foer: Thanks. It's so nice to be here.

I guess given that this is such an intimate setting I think I would like to maybe chat

briefly and then have a kind of conversation with you guys about a theme, a subject, that

is almost like this thread that goes through my book, Moonwalking With Einstein which is

the relationship between knowledge and wisdom, between memory and intelligence. And I think

it's a pertinent subject to talk about at this moment in time here at Google.

In Steven Levy's book In the Plex about the history and culture of Google he has your

CEO, Larry Page, on the record saying that he looks forward to the day when ultimately

his products, Google products, will be channeled straight into your brain, where you will merely

think of a question and the answer will come straight to you. In fact someday maybe you'll

have a Google implant that will connect you directly to Google services.

Sergey Brin has said that ultimately Google is about making, augmenting your brain with

sort of all of the world's knowledge. And that my sound kinda like science fiction,

but I'm enough of a technological determinist and I guess have enough faith in Google [chuckles]

to believe that that is something that may ultimately come about. And I think if you

look around at sort of what's going on in the world there are enough indicators that

suggest that this is a future that's not that impossible.

So already you know cochlear implants have been installed in something like over 200,000

human brains; take sound waves, turns them into electrical impulses, channels them into

you; the brain stem allows deaf people to hear. And you've got a number of sort of research

firms all over the world, research groups I should say, working on developing sort of

primitive neuroprosthetics.

I did a story for Esquire a few years back about a guy called Erik Ramsey who when he

was 16 years old was in this absolutely tragic car accident that left him locked in, totally

took away his ability to control any part of his body beyond his eyes. But cognitively

he was totally there and working with a scientist, a neuroscientist in Georgia, he had a set

of electrodes implanted into the part of the pre-motor cortex that controls sort of movement

of the mouth, the tongue, the lips. And the notion is that at some point they're training

him to control the prosthetic voice using his thoughts. So that's sort of like one way

communication, I think the ultimate vision is some sort of two way communication where

it's not just data coming but data coming into the brain.

And I don't know if it's gonna be Google who does this or I don't know if it's gonna happen

in my lifetime, but if you look at sort of the broad trajectory of where technology is

going in terms of creating an ever more seamless connection, interface, between the minds that

are embodied in our brains and the memories that are embodied in our technology, in our

devices like our Smart Phones, I think it's fair to say that Google has got a nice head

start.

And there was some reporting in The New York Times earlier this year by Nick Bilton who

suggested that you guys are working on a heads up display that he says is gonna be out by

Christmas. And that the notion is we'll be walking around with sort of all of this information

sort of projected straight on to our retinas which is a much less clumsy and clunky way

of tapping into the collective knowledge of mankind than using my thumbs or even talking

to my phone.

And I think this is poised to be like the big story of my lifetime, of the next several

decades is how life is going to change as we really merge in a more seamless way our

internal and our external minds.

And—

I think this is actually an old story; we've been figuring out better and better ways to

externalize our memories and to recall them, activate them with better and better technologies

basically since the first caveman splashed paint on the wall of a cave.

Once upon a time anything that was going to be passed on had to be remembered, there was

nothing to do with a thought except remember it. There was no alphabet to transcribe thoughts

in, no paper to put them down upon, and anything that was gonna be conveyed first has to be

memorized.

And then there was of course this massive technological shift, the invention of writing,

and you had people who were objecting to that; 2500 years ago Socrates was at the very least

ambivalent and maybe even up in arms about this new invention called writing and he said,

"Writing is gonna make people dumb. People are gonna start taking ideas out of their

minds, putting them down on papyrus and thinking that they're still smart when in fact they're

just gonna be like empty vessels. Information memory stored on a external source, they can't

inquire of you, they can't challenge you, they're static. Real knowledge has to be sort

of deeply embedded in your consciousness." And Socrates thought the culture was headed

down this terrible, treacherous path that was gonna end no place good. Fortunately somebody

had the good sense to write down Socrates' disdain for the written word otherwise we

wouldn't remember it; thank you very much Plato.

And well I think we would all agree that he was overstating the case, we've had writing

for a couple of millennia, we're more inclined to see its benefits than its pitfalls. I think

there's also something we can recognize in what Socrates was concerned about, some nugget

of wisdom that is especially pertinent today and I think it has to do with the operating

metaphor in how we think about memory, how we talk about memory colloquially. I think

it's the operating metaphor that's embedded in the idea of these Google goggles and in

so much else that we're doing with technology right now, which is this notion that our memories

are like a bank; we deposit information into this bank when we encode it and we pull it

back out at some later date. And that implies a kind of equivalence between an internal

memory and an external memory.

Actually if I've got a bank up here and a bank here, the bank that's hardware is a whole

lot less likely to make mistakes, it's a whole lot more durable, it is in almost every way

superior to the wetware that I've got up here. And I think you find, I found this idea, this

metaphor the memory as a bank is really sort of seeped into a lot of aspects of our life.

Even in school you find now kids saying, "Well why should I learn that piece of information

I can always just Google it?" And you can find teachers who seem to be agreeing with

them, "Yeah why should we teach kids facts, why should we teach kids content, we wanna

make kids into creative thinkers and to innovative thinkers, into people who can process the

world and so why should we waste our time on content, it's just gonna get forgotten

about anyways?"

And I think what we're seeing is a kind of evolution in our notion of what it means to

be erudite. So for Socrates erudition meant having all of these internally stored memories

that were sort of always there at the forefront of his mind. And I mean all the way through

the late Middle Ages you had people thinking about writing in very different terms than

we do today. People wrote things down not as we do today to sort of offload them so

we don't have to remember things, people wrote things down to aid their memories, writing

was thought of as an aide memoir.

We had, there's a wonderful quote by Petrarch, he says, "I ate in the morning what I digested

in the afternoon. What I swallowed as a boy I've ruminated upon as an old man. These writings

were implanted not just in my memory but in my marrow." There was this notion that to

really fully engage with information deeply it had to be sort of integrated into your

soul. It's a very different sort of notion of reading than we have today.

After Gutenberg, after books become mass produced commodities, erudition evolves from having

all this stuff stored internally to knowing how and where to find information in this

labyrinthine world of external memories, there are now books everywhere.

I'd argue that there is sort of a new kind of, new stage in this evolution of erudition

which is that we no longer have to even know how and where to find stuff we just need to

know the right set of search terms and then Google can take care of the rest.

And what I guess is problematic about this metaphor of memory as a bank is that it's

not really how our memories work. Our memories are not sequestered in some vault in our brain

they're actually always there, they are always shaping how we perceive the world, how we

make decisions in the world, how we move through the world, our judgment, and there's this

kind of continuous feedback process between our perception and our memory. Our memories

are actually much less like a bank and much more like a lens; a lens that is constantly

filtering the world for us and helping us to make sense of it.

And I think this is something that we all kind of intuitively get. I mean if I was to

sit down next to a Google engineer and look at a website we would see two very different

things; we actually would look at the world differently because of the memories that we've

got floating around in our skulls. The Google engineer would see all sorts of things that

just don't have meaning to me, that aren't relevant to me, that I don't even understand.

And likewise if we took a walk in a park because I studied evolutionary biology in college

and know a little bit about the life history of trees, there are things that I pay attention

to, things that direct sort of my attention that might not otherwise catch another person's.

And my experience of that walk in the park is going to be qualitatively different from

somebody else's.

And I guess that's what is sort of the notion behind what Petrarch was saying is look, our

memories make us who we are, they're at the root of not just our self identity but our

values, our character, our judgments, our sense of appreciation of the world.

And it's not just about information as sort of a-- well I'll tell you a story which is

that not long ago I was in Shanghai doing an assignment for National Geographic, and

I went through high school not having received even the smallest bit of education about Chinese

history; I didn't know that Kublai Khan was a real person, which in retrospect is kind

of amazing.

And I tried to make the best of this three days that I had in Shanghai and I tried to

go to all the museums and interpret the culture as best I could and make sense of the history.

And what I found was that not just that I didn't know this stuff it was I didn't even

have the ability to learn it; I didn't have the basic facts to fasten other facts to.

And what that suggests is the extent to which our memories, my experience was impoverished

is what it points to, my experience was impoverished. And it kinda sucked and it made me regret

the fact that I didn't know anything about Chinese history.

And I guess part of what makes me nervous about sort of this direction that technology,

our culture seems to be going in, is that in the process of privileging this kind of

memory that we are devaluing the other kind of memory, the kind of memory that actually

really matters to living a rich life, to living a good life.

And there was this study that I'm sure many of you are aware of in the Journal of Science

last year that suggested that when people know their piece of information is stored

on the Internet in a computer that they invest less of themselves in remembering it and tend

to have a worse memory for that information just because they know that it exists online.

It's not that Google's making us dumb, it's that Google is making us lazy, that's what

that study really suggested.

When we, when I think about this vision of the future that Larry Page is pre-visioning

of a world in which we are constantly plugged in and constantly have the entire collective

knowledge of humanity, the greater human consciousness all sort of immediately accessible, always

there, always on, I think there are gonna be ways in which it's gonna be truly wonderful,

truly glorious having access to all of the world's information is incredible.

But the thing that I hope we will keep in mind is that infinite knowledge is not the

same thing as wisdom and that I hope Google will keep in mind as it develops all of this

technology because over the next couple of decades you guys are gonna have a power to

shape our culture and shape how humans live at a very intimate level in a way that I don't

know that any institution outside of organized religion has ever had before. And I guess

my hope that what will guide you guys is a kind of humanism.

I mean think this trajectory may be inevitable but Google and maybe a few of your competitors

have the power to actually guide us in some ways and to help shape the culture that we're

creating together. And what would be a shame is if it is the value of technologists, of

how do we make life easier, how to do we make life more efficient, how do we get that extra

marginal utility which doesn't necessarily equate to the good life. If that's what's

driving us, or much worse, the bottom line in maximizing shareholder profits, I hope

that what will guide Google is a sense of humanism, of people asking really big questions,

really old questions that what the good life really means and what are the values that