Search Me Not

In his April column , Jack Woodall suggested that we bring the "don't be evil" technology of Google to the rapidly advancing field of brain-computer interfacing. It'd be dandy, he argued, to order the information in our brains in hierarchical fashion. In short, he wants to Google the brain.

But the more compelling argument, to me, is that a search engine-style filter would do for the brain what it does for academic research - find the good stuff fast. It's a beautiful dream and it will probably come true within my lifetime. And as long as my brain doesn't gain banner ads, spyware, or pop-up windows, I'd probably sign up for the Woodall Experiment.

Remembering is everything in the New World. Everything you have ever written can be stored: every E-mail, grant, paper, Power Point presentation, syllabus, recommendation letter, list of plans, and perhaps even your bad poetry and divorce decree. And if it can be stored, it can be accessed, filtered, and searched.

John Dewey, the philosopher most responsible for the development of the social sciences, wrote a large amount - by one estimation more than 13,000 pages of manuscript and perhaps a gigabyte of searchable correspondence. Historians of science in 20 years will find that even "B-list" scholars of 2006 produce ten times that volume of information in the course of a decade, not including the vault of other people's data we store in case we need it.

My most disorganized friends, or at least the smart ones, are steadily working their way toward scanning all the paper in their offices onto hard drives, turning piles of nomenclature and unfinished projects into a different kind of pile. Desks get cleaned, computers get filled. But the clutter is still there, it's just hidden more effectively. Those who scan their worlds without clearing out the junk and learning to sort information just make their messes more intimate. I don't need to remember a lot of what is stored around my office or in the corners of my mind.

There is something to be said for forgetting. Nietzsche argued that those who cannot forget are quickly driven to madness. The ultimate stoic, Epictetus, implored Roman soldiers to kiss everyone in their lives goodbye every time they walked out the door, pointing to the importance of focusing on the present. Beta-blockers such as Inderal can literally disconnect memories from their emotional impact; predictably, many victims of trauma are eager to kill the pain that data stored in the brain can cause.

Numerous studies on the most stressful activities in human life - moving, divorce, the death of a parent or child - suggest that the stress of a life change is mostly a matter of cognitive dissonance, the pain of remembering what is lost. Santayana, famous for his statement that those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it, wrote nonetheless: "I would I might forget that I am I, and break the heavy chain that binds me fast."

The problem with hooking search engine technology up to my mind is that part of my identity, which I happen to like, has to do with my ability to really forget, to shape my own life. Perhaps a search engine could make that easier, perhaps I could block out things that are awful. But then again, Kierkegaard wrote: "Marry, and you will regret it. Do not marry, and you will also regret it." And he didn't even have a good memory.

A Google Map of your mind presents problems of even greater scope, of course: When I Google "Glenn McGee" + bioethics, I find 39,800 results. Flattering? Hardly. Google has just made it that much more obvious that my research has become, once disseminated, thousands of slices of incoherence. Scholars speak of parsing their studies into the "least publishable unit." I don't want my self-perception cut that way.

Today's search engine is no better than the myopic man behind the algorythmic curtain, and I am not sure what he'd make of the detritus in my brain.

Brains are great. Machines are great. Connecting them is great. But before the interface becomes my identity, I'd like it to be just a bit more refined.

Glenn McGee is the director of the Alden March Bioethics Institute at Albany Medical College, where he holds the John A. Balint Endowed Chair in Medical Ethics.