Are Total Recall-Style Fake Memory Implants Coming Soon?
Those crazy kids at Gizmodo had a story today called “Scientists Invent Method to Create Memories in Brains” that got a lot of attention.
It sounds like a Philip K. Dick story. Sadly Gizmodo is about as reliable on science reporting as their corporate sibling Gawker is on politics, but the actual report is interesting, and even pretty hopeful.
The real paper is ”Mnemonic Representations of Transient Stimuli and Temporal Sequences in Rodent Hippocampus In Vitro,” and it describes an interesting experiment: the researchers at Case Western, Ben W. Strowbridge and Robert A. Hyde, dissected out little fragments of a structure in a rat’s brain called the hippocampus, put them on glass, and stimulated them. They were able to show that the little bits of hippocampus changed their activity in a way that was similar to what happened in rat hippocampus in live rats who were exposed to some simple stimulus. (I picked up a nice picture fron an NIH publication that shows where the hippocampus is.)
Here's a picture for context: a rat's brain and a human brain, both with the hippocampus in brown.
In other words, instead of creating enduring memories in brains, the researchers created short term changing in little pieces of brain tissue in a glass dish. Not nearly as exciting, but still interesting.
You see, what they were doing is showing that they could get their little bits of rat brain to form very simple short-term memories, and they could tell that the memories were there in the rat brain tissue. They were actually seeing how the brain changed to form those memories, and that has some real potential. The better this is understood, the more likely we will be able to understand the changes that destroy memory, say in Alzheimers.
It’s not Total Recall, but it’s pretty neat.
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Related at PJ Lifestyle:
Why bother? People these days have fake memories out the wazoo. Look who they put into the WH despite decades of history that should have told them that was a very stupid idea.
False memory implantation has been operating on us for decades under the assumed identity of liberal education.
With this technique, we “remember” republicans as slave traders, dixiecrats as the party of human rights, business successes like Carnegie as emblems of greed, the poor as examples of moral purity, and above all America as the greatest sin against God, in the words of Obama’s spritual advisor.
Only the true unbeliever is going to require hardware re-tooling; but a bullet will always be cheaper.
They are already here, see any Liberal collage student and ask them a histoy question.
You all beat me to the punch. Implanted memories, false memories, defective memories all amount to the same thing. We don’t need neurosurgeries to implant false memories.
Some people already willingly rewrite their own memory circuits if the new memory fits their world view better. Others can be helped along with hypnotism, sodium pentathol, or electro-shock therapy. And the rest of us comrades will agree to any history you want after a stint or two in a re-education camp.
And if all those methods fail, why bother with implanted memories, when a simple lobotomy can give you a nice clean slate to make a new you?
I saw this article (before clicking through) and was reminded that ‘false memory’ or ‘memory borrowing’ is also from an old Twilight zone where the main charachter sells his memories (and they are deleted from his mind)… eventually he discovers he has ‘nothing’ and forces the guy doing the procedure to load him up… he ends up with lots of odd ball stuff, like having gone to an all girls finishing school.