Listen: Philly man explains what it’s like to use Twitter as his digital memory

     After a traumatic brain injury, Thomas Dixon learned how to use Twitter to act as his digital episodic memory. (Kimberly Paynter/WHYY)

    After a traumatic brain injury, Thomas Dixon learned how to use Twitter to act as his digital episodic memory. (Kimberly Paynter/WHYY)

    When a brain injury caused serious, ongoing episodic memory loss, it didn’t take long for Thomas Dixon to figure out how to use technology to create his own digital memory.

    “Twitter works the way that episodic memory does,” Dixon says, keeping the most recent tweets at the top of the list.

    Take 50 seconds to hear Dixon explain some of the advantages of his situation:

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    He says that he feels lucky to be living at a time when tools like Twitter can help him live a fairly normal life. “If we didn’t have the current state of technology — let’s say we reversed everything by 20 years — I would be significantly impaired.”

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