Tomorrowland Read Online Free PDF Page B

collection of Gertrude Stein’s writings, the fireside scratch of a chatty F.D.R., a cinematic tour of Stephen Hawking’s universe, and, of course, Timothy Leary’s Internet broadcast of his last days on earth.
    But what we don’t have is the people themselves; we don’t have their consciousness, and that, many feel, is the real loss. And, if you believe the believers, that is about to change.
    They’re calling it the Soul Catcher, a pet name really, as if the soul were something that could be caught like a fish. It’s the brainchild of Dr. Peter Cochrane, chief technical officer for British Telecommunications: a micromemory chip implanted in the human brain, implanted for the whole of a lifetime, meant to record the whole of that lifetime.
    As future-forward as this chip may sound, the first step — integrating it with the body — already shows great promise. And has for some time. Back in the late 1990s, researchers at Stanford University found a way to splice nerves and, using a chip, grow them back together. A few years later, in a Georgia hospital, electrodes were successfully embedded in the brain of a completely paralyzed man, translating thoughts into cursor movement. This was also when we learned that, unlike the rest of the body, which tends to reject foreign implants, the nervous system is incorporative — meaning that the act of placing a chunk of metalinto the brain is more like rewiring a light switch than reinventing the wheel.
    The technical name for this first step is “brain-computer interface,” or BCI. There are now hundreds of researchers pioneering BCI science, with the aforementioned efforts being merely the initial drops in what has since become a much larger ocean. Many of them share Cochrane’s interest in memory. Theodore Berger, for example, a neural engineer at the University of Southern California, is working on an artificial hippocampus, one of the core neuronal structures implicated in this process. Berger’s device records the electrical activity that arises whenever we encode short-term memories — for example, learning to play scales — then translates them into digital signals. These signals are sent to a computer, transformed once again, and then re-fed into the brain, where they’re then stored as long-term memories. While the device is far from done, Berger has run successful tests with monkeys and rats and is now working with humans.
    Cochrane also has to invent new gear to pioneer the Soul Catcher, but it’s based on older gizmos. By using variations of existing technologies — the silicon retina, artificial cochlea, artificial tongue — scientists have successfully documented the activity of each of the five senses. Each time we have a sensory experience, a chemical reaction is triggered in the brain, which we interpret as emotion. Thus Cochrane’s next goal — which he thinks will take about five years to achieve — is the creation of microneurochemical sensors capable of measuring, tracking, and recording these reactions, eventually creating a record of a lifetime’s worth of experience and feeling.
    Now that would be quite a record.
    Throughout the typical seventy-year human life span, the brain processes something akin to 50 terabytes of memory, a data accumulation equivalent to millions of books. In about ten years, Cochrane says, computers will be so advanced that they will be capable of reassembling millions of bits of recorded experience into a facsimile of individual perspective. Think, for instance, ofa chip that could record everything that a person ever ate — a lifetime of fast food and gourmet snacks and all the rest. Now add to that a record of the chemical reactions set in motion by eating these meals. A computer powerful enough to synthesize this data could end up with a pretty good idea of that person’s taste. Multiply this by all sensory experiences, and you have a machine capable of reproducing all experience, over and over again.