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Meanwhile, in the US, a research scientist called Gordon Bell is a self-appointed guinea pig, testing the potential of a digital database called MyLifeBits, which records the minutiae of his life, including conversations with his wife, consultations with doctors, videos of events and scanned documents. A GPS system tracks his every move.

“There is a technical push for this kind of software, capturing everything that is done or said and indexing it,” says Ken Wood. But why? And how tedious. “Obviously one would want to be selective in reality, but we are exploring the enormous possibilities for personal archiving and working out how best to organise data so that the user can easily access the piece of information he wants.”

Could surrogate memory make us helplessly dependent, depriving us of the ability to lay down our own memories? When the hard drive of Gordon Bell’s computer crashed last year, losing four months of data, he described it as “a severe emotional blow, perhaps like having one’s memories taken away”. Martin Conway dismisses such concerns: “The Bell experiment is fairly stupid and predicated on a failure to understand human memory,” he says. “Memories encode meanings and are not literal records of the past. I’d say that for the period in which he lost his records his memory is now working normally — it is the period for which he has records that things are abnormal.”

Even so, the implications of such technology are mind-boggling. What if you could retrieve a record of exactly what was said in a row with your husband? Or police could prove what happened in the lead-up to a traffic accident? A “black box” of your life is a scary thought. No thanks for the memories.

The Memory Experience, the BBC’s season of programmes about memory, continues tomorrow morning on Radio 4 at 9.30am with the story of a man with amnesia: how does he remember who Martin Luther King is when he can’t recall what he had for lunch?

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