What I Wish They’d Invent

Inventions are nothing but a gift of science. In today’s era, we humans, are in a situation in which without science we cannot even imagine our survival. Without science there would have been no advancement, the one’s which are part and parcel of over lives from tiniest needle to prodigious discoveries. If there was no science, none of us would have made any progress. Be it a person, country, or at global level, the effect of scientific inventions on human life is enormous. Enormous in a way that it’s even difficult to comprehend.

William Gibson’s well liked science fiction tale “Johnny Mnemonic” envisioned sensitive information being carried by microchips in the brain by 2021, imagine having real life devices as such. Innovations can offer scientists even more undeviated ingress to the human brain. So, if I were given the allowed a device which is that iinvented. It would have surely been a Memory browser. Sort of device through which everything in your memory can be accessed like an archive and can detect the brain’s electrical activity. The data stored could be browsed and shared. Visual stuff (images and Videos) could be displayed, Conversations and experiences could be recorded. Neuroscientists have indeed done this model of mind-reading before. (One cool example: Formerly, scientists used a technique to reconstruct basic attributes of movie clips from brain activity.)

How much superior it would have been to preserve everything, not only the inscribed thoughts and snapped moments of life, but the entire brain: the detailed things that we know and everything that we remember, the intrigues and heartbreaks, the moments of victory and of humiliation, the lies that we weave and the truths that we grasped. If one could ever save their brain like a computer’s hard drive, would they? If discoveries like memory browsers could be possible then it’s a question each one of us would be confronting soon. Several engineers are working on the technology that will be able to generate wholesale copies of our minds and memories that will exist even after we are blazed or buried. If neuroscientists succeed, it is assumed to have heartfelt, and perhaps bewildered, repercussions for the way we live, who we adore and how we die.

“We can take someone’s memory — which is typically something internal and private — and we can pull it out from their brains”.
~ Brice Kuhl, Neuroscientist

The reason why I think invention like this might be possible is that there already are several ongoing types of research on a new field called “Brain-Computer Interaction (BCI)” or the “Mind-Machine Interface (MMI)”, i.e, devising a communication passage that deciphers human brain signals into electrical signals which are to be acted upon by extrinsic devices. The idea is still quite perplexing on the surface though, but it is going to be trailblazing once mastered. Although I am not sure about memory, I think if it’s possible, then one can represent their memories through some form of data, and conserve it as you do on a USB stick. The first step toward a memory browser in my opinion would be the creation of an artificial human brain on which a backup of a human’s memories would be able to ‘run’.

Although, there are no such parts in the human brain that can be scrutinized as RAM and ROM. But for comparative purposes, like computer holds the information in RAM for the time needed, and then discards it once it is no longer in use. Similarly, brain memories are also RAM type. The brain will hold them throughout that particular life but, once we die, like withdrawing power supply. Memories too will be blotted out. The present thoughts and the daily patterns can be regarded as loaded processes in RAM because the habits are the united thingsntional in nature. And are sometimes performed unconditionally by us. RAM can roughly be considered as analogous to short-term memory in the brain.

Whereas, the memories sstockpiled in our subconscious psyche can be considered as ROM type. These memories will never be gone even after death. They will continue to live afterlife, kind of eternal in a way. Their capacity is infinite. The experiences and absorbed facts can be defined as ROM. Because the brain will use it whenever needed. Incidents and facts are notions that don’t change for a long time. Even though I am unsure if uploading of data in mind is practicable through electrical impulses, the READ-ONLY mode is pretty much possible.

It’s common knowledge that irretrievable memories still exist in our brains. And for anyone who’s ever forgotten something or someone who wishes to remember certain moments from the past, it could all be made possible through this invention as human memory occurs in different fragments of the brain altogether, and some types of memories remain intact in our brain for a prolonged duration as compared to others. The memory might have disappeared from your conscious mind, it may not be gone. There had been numerous researches through which brain imaging revealed patterns of activation that correlated to memories that people thought they’d lost.

“Even thouis your brain still holds this information, you might not always have access to it”, enunciated, neurobiologist, Jeffrey Johnson. There are times when we can recall having ice cream at an indubitable eatery, but not which flavour we precisely ate; perhaps we remember a specific conversation, but not how we responded. It’s quite vague whether those details vanish from the mind altogether, are encompassed by some larger pattern, or remain intact but beyond reach.

The human brain, after all, is a natural computer. Computer and social scientists have been building systems of machine conciliated intelligence that are forums through which human memory can be gathered and stored. This idea dates back to the birth of artificial intelligence. The other method depends on connectionist models of communication that are supposed to be analogous to neuronal communication in the human brain. Both academic and private enterprises have been developing such tools for the past 30+ years.

While we know a lot about the biomechanics of how the brain constitutes memories, we know very little about the coding and emblematic scheme. Consequently, we have no idea how to decrypt human memories from their neural circuit representation.

But that is not quite the entire issue. The major issue is that of storage in various parts of the brain, memories in the human brain are not preserved in a separate memory slot like they are in a PC’s. In a computer, long-term information storage is stored within specialized elements, e.g. RAM, floppy disk drive, jump drive, data cloud. Nevertheless, in the brain, memories are scattered throughout the extensive neural networks that are performing the processing task. As a result, the memories can’t be transmitted, individually from the decoding and intellectual computing circuits that use them. In simple terms, reading out human memory may require accessing and imitating the entire brain.

Presently, there are various ongoing researches for inventions that could decode thoughts and read minds. Some are listed below –

Scientists at the University of California, have come up with a mind-reading tool that also turns the cognitive activity into text with better than 90% exactness. As a substitute for understanding the words a person is enouncing, it can determine what that person is hearing, with activity solely. It’s the first step toward generating a seemingly worn gadget that can be used to convert thoughts to text whether “perceived” or “produced” speech.

Carnegie Mellon University research has discovered ways to read “complex thoughts“ based on brain scans, and output text suitably. The university’s research revealed that complex thinking could permit its A.I. to foretell the next “sentence” in the thought process.

Though it may seem strange, even Facebook has it’s ongoing mind-reading plan. The social networking company’s confidential Building 8 division is working on a way for users to send text over Facebook using thoughts alone.

Inception is to plant an authentic idea deep in the target’s brain that their influential subconscious becomes persuaded that it is genuine and theyr own. Basically, if we have strong enough feelings tied to our perception of an incident, that for incident appears real to us and we begin to treat its memory as such. And because we acquire so much of our idenotification from our past selves, these events (be it real or unreal) cater for our vision of ourselves.