Download Your Memories; Retrieve Them Later
Could human memories be uploaded and stored -- just like data -- in a computer? Scientists say not now, but in the coming decades it’s likely we’ll be able to store our memories in a way that allows us to retrieve them later. Long the stuff of science fiction novels, this kind of merger between computer technology and the human brain is being pushed by new findings in neuroscience, as well as advances in computer science and artificial intelligence. |
Scientists are getting closer to replicating the properties of the brain in computers.
Images.com/Corbis
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Two
new high-profile scientific projects are also giving impetus to this idea.
President Obama announced a $1 billion effort in February to map the brain,
while the European Union announced it would fund a $1.3 billion effort to build
a human brain in a silicon substrate. But before anything so ambitious as uploading
ourselves to a computer is possible, neuroscientists say they have to figure
how and where our memories exist.
“It’s clearly beyond the capabilities of what
we have today,” said Ted Berger, a neuroscientist at the University of Southern
California. “But it’s also true that we are starting to see how we could
approach replicating the properties of the brain and replicating the properties
of particular brains. In a couple of decades, we will have answers to those
questions.”
Berger and Sam Deadwyler at Wake
Forest University are doing experiments in which they are actually inserting
memories into the brains of rats by stimulating certain parts of the
hippocampus with electrical signals.
“What we can see is there are
particular patterns and activity in space and time that are specific to the
object,” Berger said. “If an animal has to remember a Red Bull can instead of a
can of Coke, there’s a particular space-time activity that is different. We’ve
been able to find for the first time these memory patterns.”
Berger said they have also been able
to disable the hippocampus, in effect blocking the memory, and then electronically
stimulating certain areas to create a “new” memory.
“We’ve already shown that the
strategy will work in monkeys and in rats,” he said. “I do think we can do this
in humans.”
At the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, Ed Boyden leads the Synthetic Neurobiology Group, which is building
new tools to explore the brain.
In recent year, Boyden and his
colleagues have found a protein in algae that is able to convert light into
electricity. When the protein, called channelrhodopsin, is introduced into certain
neurons, it allows them to be triggered by light. The patterns can they be
translated into electrical impulses and then mapped – resulting in a computer
code of a memory.
By using this light-electricity
protein to turn neurons on and off with light, Boyden is hoping to soon make an
on-off switch for brain cells, which would be a huge advance to help patients
with brain disorders.
“Our past work has been shutting
down neurons in the brain,” Boyden said. “We could play back activity patterns
and see how it responds. You need to do more than add a control, you should be
able to read out, to build and map at the molecular level at the brain. We’ve
opened a whole number of fronts on these technologies.”
USC’s Berger says there’s one big
obstacle for actually copying and uploading a complete set of human memories.
They seem to disappear when they aren’t being used.
“We can go to a microchip and say here
are a few bytes of memory, we can see them anytime they want,” he said. “It’s
like buying a Sears catalog of memories and you look through these bins and see
what’s there. But that’s not the way it works with humans or animals. When we
use the memories, that’s when they appear. But when we don’t we don’t know
where they are.”
Source: www.news.discovery.com
