Memory is getting to be big business

I can never remember my wife’s birthday. Not that I don’t try to or have a gift at the ready but keeping the date in the forefront of my memory is difficult. Now, before you start accusing me of being a bad husband, which on some days I’m sure I can be, I have a good reason for this problem, and like a lot of problems in our world today it is caused by a cell phone.

When my spouse’s now-dearly-departed mother set up mobile phones for her children she attempted to get birthday dates as phone numbers. Unable to do so, instead of getting a completely random number, she went with a numerically adjacent figure. For the sake of explanation, let’s say my wife’s birthday was Oct. 30, her phone would end with the digits 1031.

So, when put on the spot, I always mix the two up. I’ve looked quite the fool at pharmacy counters and other places where confirming birth dates are a part of conducting a transaction.

Memory is big business these days in the physical and digital world. Researchers have predicted that there will be huge gaps in our recorded history as storage media continues to change and become obsolete. I have a stack of old floppy disks and camera memory cards, whose contents will never be seen again. We all have photos and notes on cell phones that will be lost with a device crash or upgrade unless they are uploaded somewhere else for safekeeping or physical copies are made.

Our brains reportedly can’t retain information as well as previous generations could because we are always able to retrieve data with a few swipes on a screen or clicks on a keyboard. This has opened a massive market for brain health supplements and mental exercise apps, purchased through the very devices that have robbed us of our memory.

The digital lives we’ve created also require a lot of memory, in the form of massive server housing data centers. The jury is still out on how such facilities affect humans and our environment. Nobody seems to want to live near one, but no one is willing to go back to traditional banking or actually going to the store.

A group of scientists recently built a working computer memory out of shiitake mushrooms. Yes, apparently those delicious mushrooms from Japan contain fibrous tissue that operate much like a human brain and can “remember” things with low amounts of electricity. This discovery, it is hoped, will help solve the data center problem. No longer will vast amounts of resources, like rare earth metals and water, be needed to store all of the data floating around on the cloud. There will be no more global competition to build computer chips. But we’re going to need more mushroom farms.

The even better news is that if this doesn’t work you can just eat the shiitake mushrooms.

I hear they’re good for your memory.