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Wishing For A Mental Rewind Button

from the changes-in-perception dept

Tue, Jan 27th 2009 9:13pm — Mike Masnick

In a recent blog post by Scott Adams, he notes his desire for a rewind button on life. The post starts out by talking about seeing something through a window that he didn't quite catch, and wishing for a rewind button on the window -- like a DVR (the post then goes off on an angry tangent about auto repair these days that doesn't actually seem connected to the rewind part). That struck me as interesting, because I've caught myself wanting the same thing recently. The more I've used a DVR, the more I get annoyed at things that don't have such a capability. For example, when listening to the radio or just talking to people, there are moments when I find my brain asking to rewind, in part because it's become so accustomed to the possibility of rewinding TV. I wonder if this will lead to more demand for devices that record everything you see. Traditionally, such "backup brain" devices have been talked about for the purposes of recalling and categorizing stuff -- but if there's increasing demand to simply replay what you just heard or saw, it could become useful in unexpected ways.

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Filed Under: perception, rewind, scott adams

23 Comments

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Anonymous Coward, 27 Jan 2009 @ 9:47pm

Ah, external memory devices. We creep ever closer to the world of Ghost In The Shell...
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Anonymous Coward, 27 Jan 2009 @ 9:57pm

Indeed I've been wanting the same thing as I'm always missing something on the radio when in the car. It would be handy if someone would invent glasses with a video recorder that could interface with a computer, automatically recording everything you see and hear. Of course the privacy issues would be a nightmare.
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AMusingFool (profile), 27 Jan 2009 @ 10:03pm

NPR had this in their last membership drive...
http://www.radiobookmark.com/
(thanks for reminding me of it :)
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Anonymous Coward, 27 Jan 2009 @ 10:06pm

too much scifi?
i for one never thought of the "mental rewind", but i guess after spending hours upon hours of watching sci-fi movies I've been wanting to add a hard drive to my brain in hopes of getting unlimited memory.
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eleete, 27 Jan 2009 @ 10:48pm

Mental Rewind
http://nexus404.com/Blog/2007/10/18/digital-video-camera-spy-glasses-record-all-you-see/

Somethin g like these would be cool. With larger memory capacities we could eventually have 48 hour lengths of video or more.
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Anonymous Coward, 27 Jan 2009 @ 10:58pm

Re: Mental Rewind
Yeah those would work. If you were Ali G. I think they need to be something no one would notice. But that's a start. I wonder how good the picture quality is?
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eleete, 27 Jan 2009 @ 11:03pm

Re: Re: Mental Rewind
Admittedly, they are ugly, and resolution is cruddy too at 510 x 492. What will these be like in 10 years though? That's where I was thinking.
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Anonymous Coward, 28 Jan 2009 @ 1:01am

"what did I just say??!!?!?!?"
"love of my life, I will tell you exactly what you just said...

What's more, I will tell you exactly what you said when we had this argument last time"

At last - the equalizer!
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Anonymous Coward, 28 Jan 2009 @ 1:05am

Exactly. It could mean a huge jump in divorce rates and lawsuits.
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t0m5k1, 28 Jan 2009 @ 1:47am

WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW

i had this exact same thought when i first discovered the VHS recorder my mu had brought when i was a kid!!!!

ever since then (even on acid!) i have wanted such a capability and thought it was part of my 'Condition' & assumed no one else would think of such a bizarre thought!!!

man the times i have sat there wishing i could rewind life or even just my brain!!

now my world has trully shrunk
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Shakespere, 28 Jan 2009 @ 2:09am

Be careful what you wish for.....
For all those above who think a life rewind would be great, think about other people having that capability. "Hey dude let's look at that stupid thing you did again... and again... come on one more time." "I almost missed your insult until I had time to replay it 50 times and started to wonder what you REALLY meant by that." Its one thing to rewind a carefully written script or a sporting event, but most of us experience grace by the fact that people can't replay what we just said or did.
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Neverhood, 28 Jan 2009 @ 2:10am

ohh the joy
Argueing with my wife would become so much simpler and easier if I had a copy of our previous conversations. Somehow, what who said before always ends up being the issue we can never agree about.
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Neverhood, 28 Jan 2009 @ 2:14am

Re: Be careful what you wish for.....
Your are so right.
We would have to redefine the way we communicate.

But, come to think about it, with Instant messaging, social networking and 10 digital cameras at every party, we are coming closer to it, and I think it is already changing the way we behave in those situations.
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Liz, 28 Jan 2009 @ 2:36am

But, come to think about it, with Instant messaging, social networking and 10 digital cameras at every party, we are coming closer to it, and I think it is already changing the way we behave in those situations.

Would that be more - or less like idiots? I think YouTube may have the answer.
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elduderino, 28 Jan 2009 @ 5:09am

really??
I dunno if anyone ever reads my comments, they're usually sarcastic or at least very brief... but this time, in all seriousness, I don't wanna sound like my "dont go to wikipedia" professors, but... dude, mike, just pay attention, it's that simple.. you ask companies to do it all the time.. don't you?
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jeadly (profile), 28 Jan 2009 @ 5:12am

Similarish
When reading paper books I find myself wanting to right-click to Google a term or ctrl+F to search for text on the page. I think this is an increasing trend of tech withdrawal when confronted with classic technologies that used to be adequate.
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Anonymous Coward, 28 Jan 2009 @ 5:36am

I would rather have Ctrl-F in real life, but that's just me. Trying to find something in a printed article or book is annoying.
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Cixelsid, 28 Jan 2009 @ 5:51am

Undo
A lot of times when I do something stupid in real life I wish I could just "Ctrl+Z"
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elduderino, 28 Jan 2009 @ 6:52am

REALLY???????
now I'm just a former janitor trying to make it in the ivory tower lately... but come on people... how hard is it to pay attention? I'm shocked and apalled, normally I agree with just about everything that's said on techdirt and I can see the consumerism rampant in the comments too. But this is beyond ridiculous. I said it before and I'll say it again. Pay attention! It's really quite simple. Have we really become the mtv generation we were warned about so many years ago? Can we not even have brief conversations and retain that knowledge without a "hard copy"?

If that's the case, why are we all so AGAINST wire tapping? the government has been trying to help us all out and we didn't even know it!!! I bet there are plenty of archived conversations at the FBI, CIA, NSA, etc.

Oh wait, all of the sudden nobody wants their convos recorded anymore, right?
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Urza, 28 Jan 2009 @ 7:07am

Hmmm...
Yea, that'd be great...until the FBI subpoenaed your life.
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tony, 28 Jan 2009 @ 9:42am

Mental Rewind
there is already such a thing in place... it's called the akashic record... you can only view it though and not change anything... it's basically just having your mind travel fast enough and overtake the past light reflections of everything you saw, then you see the past... you see?
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Anthony, 28 Jan 2009 @ 11:23am

first saw this several years ago
My friends (a couple) had a Tivo. I didn't. We were at dinner one night and the waitress did something funny. One of them said, "I wish I could rewind that!"

I thought they were just weird. Of course, now that I have my own Tivo, I get the same impulse. I try to suppress it though.
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Gene Cavanaugh, 28 Jan 2009 @ 6:00pm

Rewind
I agree. I am trying to get industry interested in such a thing; it is a camera in the ever-present headset for phones, with the added feature that it constantly records what you see and uploads it to a central server (thus solving the storage problem, and also preventing, say, a criminal from preventing the record by breaking the phone - it would record and send before it was practical to destroy the images).
If you know of anyone in the phone industry who might be interested, I would like to talk to them.
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