Downloading Memories to the Brain, it's a Thing Now

The Hippocampus is a region of the brain, and it does a lot of nifty things for your memory, in sum it helps your brain convert short term memory to long term, and helps develop declarative memory, the type of memories you can recall on demand. (Those two pages consist of over 15000 words, so I'll leave it up to you to decide if you need to read them, but you won't have to to understand this post, I promise. The point is, the science is there.)

Now then, for the fun part: Professor (now Doctor) Theodore Berger and his team are developing an artificial hippocampus. You know know a sound amplifier works? It takes a weak audio signal, adds some electricity, and boost the signal to create louder, clearer audio. Translate weak audio signal for normal neuro-electric impulses, add some electricity, and pump that boosted signal back into the brain, and you have yourself a memory amplifier. In theory.


At first you may think of a computer chip in the brain as an incredibly advanced piece of equipment capable of being programed with everything the brain could possibly think, just as a minimum. Well, the work is incredible, but it's not quite that complex. The team isn't working on what the brain processes, but how the information is processed. It can mimic the way it treats information without having to know all the information. And that's the technique Dr Berger and his team are going for. This works because memories aren't stored just in one part of the brain, but a memory is actually a pattern of fired neurons. Learning is done by controlling your brain to fire those neurons in that pattern over and over, through memorization, and every time two neurons share information, the bond between them strengthens, making it easier to process future information between those two (of the billions and billions of) neurons.

This explains why, typically, you must actually work with knowledge regularly to remember it, and why it's hard for many people to 're-learn' things, or let go of past known information. Remember that next time your having an exceptionally frustrating conversation with some hyper-conservative of whatever ideology, he's not being ignorant to new information due to some fallacy of the soul or intent to be constantly ignorant, but that the connections in his brain have been hardwired to think a certain way, by himself and tenfold more-so by the immediate society around him. Thusly, he must be taught, not reamed or belittled, but instead fostered into a new way of thinking, adaptable to our changing world. A lofty task indeed, but one of compassion.

But back to our story. As per the article linked above, the chips operate with 95% accuracy. This is incredible, especially considering that article was written in 2004. More recently in 2011, Dr Berger's team is still going at it and has made much progress. This more poetic article details how they can now program memories into chips, implant them in the brain of a lab rat, and give them memories.

Now that's incredible, and it makes me think of humans. If that's the kind of progress these folk are making in seven years, I can only imagine what they'll do in the next ten. Especially if they've already been working on monkey experiments with the chips for two years. It's only a matter of time before we start looking into human uses for a virtually inexpendable wealth of memories. Downloading knowledge directly to your brain, it's a thing now (at least it's becoming the thing, very quickly).

As always, if it looks like a skeptic, walks like a skeptic, and quacks like a skeptic... Well you know, people don't think it'll happen, or don't think it should happen. A major common concern is money, that such an amazing thing will cost thousands and only be available to the wealthy, the elite, those in power, etc. Well, as of right now I don't see any reason to think that way. Sure, those with expendable funds will most likely be the ones helping fund the research and development needed to create the things initially, and will probably get to them a little sooner, and after the years of research, the developers will probably have some leftover expenses they need to pay off, and the price for such a thing will start out high.

But let's look at what's being made: it's a chip, a silicone chip that works on a basic level that can be replicated over and over. Cost of production will be next to nothing on a per unit basis. Once people realize what the thing does, they'll want them, and if a high price is preventing people from spending money on it, the manufacturer would be inane not to lower the price to let everyone benefit from this technology. My prediction is that it'll end up being something like a car or house, or even be included in some insurance plans, the cost of the product will be spread out into affordable monthly payments that even the lower class will have access to like they now have access to cars and cell phones. Sure, maybe they'll only get 200 petabytes instead of 80,000; but come on, how many times do you really want to download the internet over and over? (Those numbers are fully from thin air, to make a point; that huge amounts of data will be available in the future and eventually, like most laptop hard drives today, you get to such big numbers that the difference really doesn't mean much, but rich folk will still spend an exponentially larger amount of money to get more space they'll rarely fill.)

This knocks out a lot of the ethical concerns of whether anyone should be allowed this "unfair advantage" over those less fortunate who won't have access to the technology. If that's the issue, increase availability, don't limit it even further. Once the technology hits the middle class, which I think it will one way or another, it becomes standard, and just like everyone has a right to education, everyone should have the right to something like this, to avoid that unfair advantage. Although I believe that, I'm not scribing it hear to convince you of it, I'm saying that that idea will be a political view when it comes to the discussion of legislation surrounding people's right to cognitive enhancement. Hopefully it will be the prevailing view and democracy will do its job at making things better, but none-the-less, don't worry monopartisans, you'll have plenty of stuff to quibble about in the future's politics while science moves on to do what really matters!

On the note of that debate, why should we do this anyway? What's wrong with the way we learn things now? What's the rush, and why do we need to download vast amounts of information at once? Won't that put professors out of a job?

Keep in mind, this technology isn't the only one that's advancing at a rapid rate. Every invention and idea of mankind to date is being re-looked at, re-scrutinized, rebuilt, every day, by someone. The ability to do so is only becoming more widespread. The world is changing, it just is. A good bit of detail can be found in this wonderful book: An Optimist's Tour of the Future by Mark Stevenson, a writer who traveled the world and talked to all sorts of scientific folk and explored the potential, and potential impact, of the world's most innovative upcoming technologies. And if the word optimist makes you squeamish, don't worry, the title could be interpreted as slightly misleading: although the book ends up with overall hopeful outcomes for humanity, the content is highly scientific in nature, and Stevenson does a great job at avoiding bias and in every topic includes some arguments from "less optimistic" side, only occasionally before humbly disproving them.

As our human body of knowledge continuously expands, there becomes a point to where to make progress we need to put a lot of work in just to get the basics before we can even think about moving forward. You need to learn about biology before neuroscience, and chemistry before that, and some physics wouldn't hurt, oh and once you get to the cognitive side you might want some psychology; science builds on itself. It becomes stronger over time, and as more fields become interdisciplinary, just the premiss we need before we can even begin to act creatively will require a lot of grunt work. It took Newton his entire life to develop what we now know from him in physics, chemistry, and calculus, and now those things are taught in high school. They're basic, and they were the building blocks we needed to progress. Now they're some of the building blocks we need to progress. What happens when we advance so much, that in order just to understand the future's common technology, it will require decades of research just to learn how things work, not to mention how to improve on them?

That's where Dr Berger's technology comes in. Our educational system is constantly under attack, "we need to teach our kids how to think, not what to think!" Well, unfortunately we need both. To advance what we have, we need a firm grasp of what we've done so far. If the grunt work of route memorization of vast amounts of mathematical formula, or the basics of physics and science, can be simply downloaded into the brain, it's only half of the path of learning. So much of our educational system is constrained to teaching basic skills for a particular vocation, it leaves little room for creativity. That's where we need to rework the system. If the basics can be downloaded, our educational system can be reorganized into a system that works with the information to develop it further. We still need our whole brains for education to work, people won't just download college and get all lazy (some folk will, but that's pretty much what's happening now, only it costs a whole lot more time and money). And best of all, professors keep their jobs, they just need a different skill set of fostering creativity instead of shoveling route facts down students throats and shoving them out to "the real world", a phrase commonly used to refer to our artificially created labor system based of corporate economics, a long shot from true reality.

Essentially, you're not belittling knowledge or the pursuit of education. You still need to know how to process data into something meaningful. Just because the facts are in your brain doesn't mean you'll know what to do with them. You still need to go to school and figure out what to do with the knowledge you've received.

This will greatly shift the way we know things, and greatly increase the opportunities available to every person. If you just want to learn a skill and work a daily grind style job, you can do that much quicker and easier, and if you want to revolutionize the world by creating some innovative technology, you can do that too without becoming jaded through our inept educational system, so subject to fallacies like whether or not your teachers care enough to help you learn route material. Humanity long ago determined that one's opportunity should not be limited by the shortcomings of others, but only by one's self, and this technology will help us realize that goal.

More on the topics of upcoming technologies later, to hold you over, go read Mr Stevenson's book, and for now, thanks for reading!