‘Doing something’ is important. If I had perfect recall I’d waste hours away each day just spending time with my memories. It could become an addiction, no different from today’s use of drugs to turn filters on/off in our brains to get different results from them.

I use Google Desktop, which is like Spotlight in some ways I think. It not only indexes your hard drive but also tracks your web history, so anything I’ve read on the internet is searchable from my desktop. (Actually it doesn’t index browsing in Opera, which I’ve been using for months now.)

I’m also reminded by your comment of a Borges story called “Funes, the Memorious” about a guy who is tormented by the exactitude and exhaustiveness of his memories:

We, in a glance, perceive three wine glasses on the table; Funes saw all the shoots, clusters, and grapes of the vine. He remembered the shapes of the clouds in the south at dawn on the 30th of April of 1882, and he could compare them in his recollection with the marbled grain in the design of a leather-bound book which he had seen only once, and with the lines in the spray which an oar raised in the Rio Negro on the eve of the battle of the Quebracho. He told me: I have more memories in myself alone than all men have had since the world was a world. And again: My dreams are like your vigils. And again, toward dawn: My memory, sir, is like a garbage disposal.

And, in fact, somebody has blogged about this story as an allegory for digital information overload before.

I’m sure it would actually be distressful to be thinking about everything all the time as I described, but nevertheless I sometimes feel like I do want that. When I was moving after graduating college, my car was broken into and robbed in an alley while I slept and I lost my laptop (with no backups), dozens of files and notebooks, and almost a hundred CDs. At first I felt an overwhelming loss, but later (after insurance replaced it all, heh) I felt strangely relieved to be rid of a lot of the information I had been keeping. One of these days it might do me good to completely purge my Google Reader subscriptions, email inbox, del.icio.us bookmarks — even my hard drive. I just don’t have the discipline to sort the crucial from the disposable.

I have 554 starred articles in Google Reader, 131 bookmarks tagged “readlater” in del.icio.us, and 106 blog drafts on kbps. I guess more important than “remembering everything” is just doing something with every piece of information I consider to be significant, preferably through synthesis rather than mere recitation or transcription, like I said. But even this is probably hoping for too much.

Also, I don’t know if this is on PCs but on my MacBook when you select an icon and press command+i (get info) the first thing in the info box is “spotlight comments,” which I use to type in descriptions of images I may want to find later. And so when I am looking for a picture of food for a blog entry I just go to spotlight in the top right and type in food, and there are all my files related to food. The spotlight results (which come up in a drop-down, with the option of seeing ‘more info’ in a window) are categorized by ‘top hit’ (the most accurate result) and then applications, documents, music, pictures, etc. Sometimes in real life if am looking for something, I find myself thinking about ‘spotlighting’ or ‘command+f’ (find) and it’s frustrating not having real-life indexed as well as my laptop. This sounds like the frustration you experience as well.

I heard a segment on NPR a couple months ago about medicine one day achieving a device or something that could allow humans to have perfect recall, a sort of spotlight search or ‘find’ function for one’s own mind. The speaker was asking callers if they would want that, were it possible. It seems like it would be very handy, of course, but it is a lot of information. Searching would be good, I think, but having perfect recall “on” all the time would just be overwhelming. Your mind has filters for a reason.

The possibility is there–I once read (in ‘The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat’) about a woman who had a stroke which caused her to see and hear scenes from her childhood as vividly as if she were actually there. But at the same time, she was aware that she was in the doctor’s office talking to the doctor. It just goes to show that every little thing we experience is locked away in the unconscious mind, and it’s just a matter of accessing what you want. The brain merely chooses what information is most relevant as a way to lighten the cognitive load.

I haven’t tried iTunes’ Genius feature yet, but its methodology is horribly disappointing. That it warrants mention at an Apple Event is sad. This functionality is primitive, and should have existed years ago.

What does excite me is the recent announcement by Microsoft that they’re working on something called MixView, which generates a cloud-like view of your library, clustering artists and albums by similarity. It makes me confident that in a couple years some real strides might be made in desktop music browsing, though progress still appears to be running at a snail’s pace.

If you really are interested in brainstorming a Songbird extension with me, feel free to email me. Or if you have a team of developers and some wealthy investors I’d be happy to talk with them.

This is something I’m definitely going to keep thinking about. It’s very interesting. I’m also interested in developing the sort of music player you’ve talked about previously. If you were to describe in detail all the features of your dream music player, I might actually do it. :)

By the way, have you used the new Genius sidebar in iTunes 8? What do you think of it? (I haven’t, yet, but it looks like it may be interesting.)