* Infographic: Nicholas Felton * Over the course of a lifetime, humans take in more information and memories than their brains can handle. Microsoft researcher Gordon Bell believes this to be a bug, not a feature. And as he chronicles in his new book, Total Recall, he's working on an upgrade. Since 2001, Bell has been compulsively scanning, capturing, and logging each and every bit of personal data he generates in his daily life.

This trove includes Web sites he's visited (221,173), photos taken (56,282), emails sent and received (156,041), docs written and read (18,883), phone conversations had (2,000), photos snapped by the SenseCam hanging around his neck (66,000), songs listened to (7,139), and videos taken by him (2,164). To collect all this information, he uses a staggering assortment of hardware: desktop scanner, digicam, heart rate monitor, voice recorder, GPS logger, pedometer, smartphone, e-reader.

Called MyLifeBits, the project is feasible only because of the shrinking cost of storage, but creating the archive is just half the battle. "The problem isn't putting it all in. The problem is getting it out," says Bell, who works at Microsoft's Silicon Valley Research Group. "When I started, I couldn't find anything!" A classic file-and-folder hierarchy forces you to shoehorn multifaceted data into specific, rigid categories. Bell's solution is to make everything miscellaneous. He switched to a database that lets info exist in multiple categories and began full-text indexing, which increased his metadata—and, therefore, potential search terms—by orders of magnitude.

In Total Recall, which Bell published with research partner Jim Gemmell, the 75-year-old describes how his archive has worked for him. After the disappearance and presumed death of a friend, computer scientist Jim Gray, Bell combed through thousands of files to find forgotten photos and stories he was then able to arrange into a powerful slide show for Gray's memorial.

Bell's data dump is more than just a glorified photo album. By using e-memory as a surrogate for meat-based memory, he argues, we free our minds to engage in more creativity, learning, and innovation (sort of like Getting Things Done without all those darn Post-its).

But perhaps there's some virtue in truly forgetting—and not storing memories anywhere at all. Maybe our innate lack of RAM serves some evolutionary purpose. We all have unwanted bits we should be free to discard. (That whole freshman year of high school, for example.) "If you think you should forget, you should," Bell concedes. "But for God's sake, keep all the papers you've written and the photos you take. Sometime down the road you might be looking for something and you won't even give yourself the chance of finding it."

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