Memory and Insanity

How much do we need to remember about our past to be considered sane? If we remembered too much, would that drive us crazy?

When someone substantially loses the ability to recall short-term memories, we call that condition dementia: they are demented. This usually occurs as a result of aging and can be connected with significant changes in personality and irrational behaviors.

But consider the opposite trouble: what if you were never able to forget anything? What if you held in your conscious memory every conversation, every event, and every feeling you’ve ever experienced? Without a filtering process to screen out all those memories that seem insignificant or perhaps overly troubling, it’s difficult to imagine how you could function as a sane person.

Perhaps that is the reason why humans need to sleep and dream. Scientists theorize that this is how and when the filtering occurs; a prioritization and ordering of the thousands of potentially memorable events we encounter each day, with most either erased or deeply buried and only a few highlights stored in a place of easy access. Indeed, a persistent lack of sleep can be associated with mental instability and even psychosis.

This relationship between memory and insanity is interesting to ponder as we think about the possibility of creating what IEET Trustee Martine Rothblatt has termed “mindclones.” By instantiating enough of our memories, personality traits, and thought patterns onto a very powerful computer substrate, it should be possible to create a digital copy of our mental selves, to clone our minds.

Setting aside for now the usual objections to the feasibility and/or desirability of this idea, let’s consider the challenge of incorporating enough — not too much or too little — of the right kind of memory. Finding a satisfactory balance between short-term and long-term memories is one aspect of the challenge. Our brains do this for us now without any conscious recognition of the process on our part. We find it much easier to recall in detail what we did yesterday than what we did on the same day a month ago or a year ago. This takes place automatically, as it were, and the experience of our memories gradually fading seems perfectly natural to us.

But if our mindclones are housed within computer circuitry as opposed to biological neural pathways — in hardware instead of wetware — not only will our thought processes presumably occur at much faster rates, but our capacity to store and recall memories also will be vastly expanded.

On the surface this would seem to be beneficial; more and better computer memory is always good, right? However, if your mind suddenly finds itself besieged by thousands of memories and is not equipped to sort or prioritize them effectively, what would be the result? Insanity?

In the process of developing the hardware and software that could enable a close facsimile of a unique human personality to be implemented inside a computer (or a robot brain), researchers will need to pay close attention to the question of memory. Because having too many conscious memories might be just as disabling as having too few.