It’s November. If you are a squirrel you are packing nuts into your cheeks and burying them all over my backyard. If you are my grandparents, you are packing your beltless khakis into tasteless luggage and winabagoing them all the way to the Florida Keys. And…if you are a fellow student, your mouth begins to dry as your frame of vision drifts into the air about an inch in front and below your nose.
Panic begins to hula hoop through your intestines as your mind tries to justify the previous months’ procrastination…have we learned anything? Have we learned enough to fool our professors into a general belief that we have learned something? Did we read our books? Did we write our papers? November at Trent is a rat race to see who has enough will power to karate flu symptoms into a stalemate until midterms are past. But at the end of this mental gauntlet, the prize is in sight. Officially recognized knowledge. Patience and endurance are the only way to learn this crap, right?...Right?
Thomas Berger is a Professor of biomedical engineering at the University of Southern California.One of the issues his research engages with is “the extent to which the essential functions of a neural system can be incorporated within a hardware representation.” Berger et al.are currently preparing a paper documenting the replacement of a non-functioning hippocampus with a neural prosthesis.The hippocampus is a section of the brain that, among other things, plays an important role in the transition of information from short to long term memory.
The basic results of this study are that the machine works.A rat learned to get water repeatedly by pushing a lever while having no natural means of remembering the information.The implications of this are stunning.There is currently a machine capable of transmitting information into (potentially human) long term memories.The extrapolated consequences of this are the irrelevancy of traditional educational models and “the expert”.The whole body of knowledge pertaining to any particular field could be transmitted directly into your brain.
But let’s not get ahead of ourselves!While this artificial hippocampus works in the consolidation of information, it is still our natural senses that are transmitting the messages.Science has yet to translate the simplest sentence into code “readable” by our brains.
Does this mean the expert integrity of our dear professors is safe?Absolutely not. Jack Gallant is a Professor of Psychology focusing on systems and computational neuroscience at Berkeley.His lab to works “to understand the structure and function of the human visual system at a quantitative, computational level, and to build models that accurately predict how the brain will respond during natural vision.”
Basically, the scientists at Gallant Lab use fMRI to monitor the brains of human subjects as they are exposed to various visual stimuli.The most recent success of their research is the reconstruction of a video being watched based on brain readings alone. Although the results are not crystal clear and are based on conglomeration of a set of images, the similarity between the original film and the reconstruction is unmistakeable (look up Jack Gallant on youtube).
As the body of information grows, decoding the brain’s response to sensual stimulus will become more coherent.The idea of reversing the process from reading to writing is the beginning of a language that spans the natural and technological worlds.Used with neural prosthesis, memory implantation is looking more and more possible.
And why not? “Ho hum,” I hear you Gen. Y, Orwell reading luddites mumbling in your musty basements. Yes, of course we should be wary of technology, and no I do not want the government implanting nationalistic propaganda into me as I sleep. But I can’t help but imagine the possibilities of such a technology. True empathy would finally be possible. With the right direction, this technology could break down all barriers separating human beings by allowing us to experience life from one another’s perspective. The intellectual development of our species could be catapulted forward with millions of individuals working from a collective personal knowledge base. And we also wouldn’t have to do homework anymore. Bonus.
