This morning Patrick wrote a post about his unfortunate loss of memory and made an excellent connection to how a loss of a hard drive is very much like a loss of a part of your brain.  It would be disturbing to think of a part of your memory outside of your head if it wasn’t so advantageous–after all, it is incredibly easy to copy those files elsewhere, to edit them, and to add to them. But, unlike your brain, they are prone to randomly blowing up in your face. 

The phenomenon is actually incredibly common.  A few months ago I was reading Radical Evolution by Joel Garreau and came across a few pages on this very thing. He talks about a company called DriveSavers who offers a form of counseling as part of their data recovery service.  The employee he mentions has a degree in psychology and was a former suicide prevention counselor, who has the title “data crisi counselor.” Her whole job: help people cope with the loss of data. 

This is one of the radical new things that we’re encountering as our technology becomes an integral part of our lives.  We need counselors to handle all sorts of things that we never could have imagined before.  In fact, this is part of what allowed modern psychology to rise as a field–our increasingly busy, crazy lives are making us nuts.  We can’t seem to handle it. What other things are we going to need counseling for in the future?

Imgae courtesy of massthink