For decades, dystopian fiction has forecast a technological future in which each individual’s identity would be boiled down to an impersonal number.
If only life were that simple.
As it turns out, the numbers and symbols governing existence in the information age have multiplied in ways that threaten human memory as much as human dignity. From “personal” identification numbers to a plethora of phone numbers to Web site passwords, the alphanumeric white noise of daily life yields increasingly numbing mnemonic fallout.
On Wednesday (July 1) the giant sucking sound of this memory drain will get a little louder.
That’s when the Federal Communications Commission has decreed that all long-distance telephone access codes will grow from five digits to seven. Business travelers and bargain-seekers who now choose AT&T by dialing 10-288 or MCI with 10-321 henceforth will have to punch a whopping total of 18 digits, including the area code and main number.
The seemingly minor change could bring more than irritation, according to memory experts.
“There’s a problem regardless of whether you’re talking about access numbers, PINs, passwords, pagers or cell phones,” said psychology professor Thomas Landauer at the University of Colorado’s Institute of Cognitive Science. “Each one you add makes it harder to remember all the others.”
Landauer and crusaders like him have become mental conservationists, hatching plots to simplify or eliminate most of the confounding codes that plague contemporary life. Despite their efforts, experts still disagree over how to relieve our besieged memories.
The modern memory deficit’s origins can be seen in an anecdote involving David Starr Jordan, the first president of Stanford University, who was a renowned fish biologist before being asked to lead the fledgling school.
Asked if he was enjoying his administrative post, Jordan is said to have replied: “I like it fine. But every time I learn a student’s name, I forget the name of a fish.”
Jordan’s problem is common enough to have a name: retroactive interference. It causes most mischief when the objects of memory are arbitrary and bear no relation to each other. Such is the case with all phone numbers and, ideally, PINs and computer passwords, though the sheer difficulty of remembering random characters makes most people choose familiar names or dates that a skilled hacker easily can guess.
The memory barrier Jordan encountered has nothing to do with limited storage capacity because the human brain can hold a practically infinite amount of information. But retrieving abstract facts from the cold storage of long-term memory is tricky. Adding those extended access codes just might send part of your license plate number wafting up to the mind’s inaccessible rafters.
Phone companies have paid psychologists millions of dollars to study how numbers wreak their havoc. The question was moot in the early days of telephones, when the wired population was small enough that operators knew the name of every customer and would direct each call accordingly.
As more and more people became users, more and longer combinations of letters and numbers were needed to keep them all straight. The basic seven-digit numbers that Americans use today were introduced in Wichita Falls, Texas, in 1958.
It was no coincidence that two years earlier, a psychologist named George Miller had written a landmark paper titled “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two.” The paper codified Miller’s law, which states that people can store no more than about seven unrelated things in short-term memory.
At first that was good news for Ma Bell because short-term memory is what stores Aunt Eunice’s seven-digit number during the few moments it takes to dial after obtaining her home number from directory assistance.
But Miller’s law carried the seeds of doom for today’s world of calling cards and area code overlays. In fact, it may take only one extra number to throw off short-term memory, according to Henry Roediger, chairman of the psychology department at Washington University in St. Louis.
“Every additional number you have to dial before you get to the seven digits increases the error rate,” Roediger said. “It’s called the response prefix effect. Even if you just have to start with a `9′ or a `1,’ it drives up the errors across all seven digits.”
People can limit their goofs by using a memory strategy called “chunking,” which divides a string of symbols into parts that can be stored as whole units. Experts at chunking can store numbers of almost indefinite length; to retrieve a 42-digit number, just think of your home number and those of your five closest friends.
Bell Laboratories tried to embed chunking in ordinary seven-digit numbers by cordoning off the first three digits. Unfortunately, for reasons no one quite understands, memory is helped more when the first chunk consists of four digits.
“It was a bit more efficient for the early switching machines to process the three-digit code first,” said Landauer, who did psychology for Bell Labs before moving to Colorado. “By the time research psychologists discovered it was easier for people the other way, it was too late.”
Occasionally, the research gets done in time to make a difference. When the available “1-800” toll-free numbers started running out in the early 1990s, the phone companies turned to Landauer.
“I did a literature search and decided `888′ would be the easiest prefix to remember,” he said. “Repeated digits are simple to begin with, and eight seems to be the perfect number for memorizing. Maybe that’s because it’s the highest one-digit even number, and it’s not confusable with other single-digit names. I’m not sure. I just know it’s the easiest to remember.”
Thus were born a million home shopping network purchases.
Ultimately, though, the cleverest ploys won’t halt memory entropy. As a stop-gap measure, people offload mental flotsam into address books, digital organizers or stray Post-It notes.
Yet that strategy is self-defeating when it comes to PINs or passwords that no one else is supposed to see. The results when people devise codes they can commit to memory are nothing short of pitiful. Even when prompted to change passwords every so often, most of us cycle through a few old standbys: Children’s names, birthdays, pet names, birthplaces, beer names.
Computer hackers who prey on the products of weak memories are like skilled magicians picking apart the tired tricks of a roadside charlatan, Landauer said.
“A lot of these guys have long lists of common names that they trade among each other,” Landauer said. “A computer can go through billions of those words in a few seconds.”
Perhaps not since the death of oral histories has human memory been so sorely tried; never has it been found so wanting. The solution, experts say, may require a popular uprising against the infernal culture of opaque codes.
“The public ought to revolt and scream for more simplicity,” said Michael Dertouzos, director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s computer science laboratory and author of the book “What Will Be.” “There is no reason why, with so much technology, we can’t take some of the complexity out of our inventions.”
One solution, according to Landauer, would be to assign each person just one PIN, to serve as phone number, credit card number, license plate number–you name it.
“You shouldn’t even have to know your PIN,” Landauer said. “It would be stored on a secure smart card. You’d just slide your card through a slot and put your finger in a fingerprint reader for identification. If you go to a hotel, the card becomes your room key. If you rent a car, it becomes your ignition key.”
Yet Landauer’s universal smart card, while a boon for tired minds, also is a mouth-watering prospect for the truly enterprising thief, Dertouzos said.
“Imagine how precious that one card would be,” Dertouzos said. “I might like things scattered around a little more.”
Dertouzos did not even address what may be the most troubling aspect of Landauer’s solution.Elegant though it is, the universal smart card would leave us squarely in a cliche sci-fi nightmare world, cementing society’s dependence on numbers–albeit unseen ones.
Worse still, individuals would be forever tied to their cards, much as residents of totalitarian states must always carry identification papers. The ubiquity of cash cards is a step in this direction.
Is there any chance our culture can just retreat a couple of steps, and rein in the expanding technological universe that taxes human memory and sanity in the first place?
Forget about it.
