The Future of the Mind (18 page)

Then the shocking truth suddenly dawns on the professor. The very night that the Krell turned on their telekinesis machine, they fell asleep. All the repressed desires from their ids then suddenly materialized. Buried in the subconscious of these highly developed creatures were the long-suppressed animal urges and desires of their ancient past. Every fantasy, every dream of revenge suddenly came true, so this great civilization destroyed itself overnight. They had conquered many worlds, but there was one thing they could not control: their own subconscious minds.

That is a lesson for anyone who desires to unleash the power of the mind. Within the mind, you find the noblest achievements and thoughts of humanity. But you will also find monsters from the id.

CHANGING WHO WE ARE: OUR MEMORIES AND INTELLIGENCE

So far, we have discussed the power of science to extend our mental abilities via telepathy and telekinesis. We basically remain the same; these developments
do nothing to change the essence of who we are. However, there is an entirely new frontier opening up that alters the very nature of what it means to be human. Using the very latest in genetics, electromagnetics, and drug therapy, it may become possible in the near future to alter our memories and even enhance our intelligence. The idea of downloading a memory, learning complex skills overnight, and becoming super intelligent is slowly leaving the realm of science fiction.

Without our memories, we are lost, cast adrift in an aimless sea of pointless stimuli, unable to understand the past or ourselves. So what happens if one day we can input artificial memories into our brains? What happens when we can become a master of any discipline simply by downloading the file into our memory? And what happens if we cannot tell the difference between real and fake memories? Then who are we?

Scientists are moving past being passive observers of nature to actively shaping and molding nature. This means that we might be able to manipulate memories, thoughts, intelligence, and consciousness. Instead of simply witnessing the intricate mechanics of the mind, in the future it will be possible to orchestrate them.

So let us now answer this question: Can we download memories?

If our brains were simple enough to be understood, we wouldn’t be smart enough to understand them.

—ANONYMOUS

5
MEMORIES AND THOUGHTS MADE TO ORDER

Neo is The One. Only he can lead a defeated humanity to victory against the Machines. Only Neo can destroy the Matrix, which has implanted false memories into our brains as a means to control us.

In a now-classic scene from the film
The Matrix
, the evil Sentinels, who guard the Matrix, have finally cornered Neo. It looks like humanity’s last hope is about to be terminated. But previously Neo had had an electrode jacked into the back of his neck that could instantly download martial-arts skills into his brain. In seconds, he becomes a karate master able to take down the Sentinels with breathtaking aerial kicks and well-placed strikes.

In
The Matrix
, learning the amazing skills of a black-belt karate master is no harder than slipping an electrode into your brain and pushing the “download” button. Perhaps one day we, too, may be able to download memories, which will vastly increase our abilities.

But what happens when the memories downloaded into your brain are false? In the movie
Total Recall
, Arnold Schwarzenegger has fake memories placed into his brain, so that the distinction between reality and fiction becomes totally blurred. He valiantly fights off the bad guys on Mars until the end of the movie, when he suddenly realizes that he himself is their leader.
He is shocked to find that his memories of being a normal, law-abiding citizen are totally manufactured.

Hollywood is fond of movies that explore the fascinating but fictional world of artificial memories. All this is impossible, of course, with today’s technology, but one can envision a day, a few decades from now, when artificial memories may indeed be inserted into the brain.

HOW WE REMEMBER

Like Phineas Gage’s, the strange case of Henry Gustav Molaison, known in the scientific literature as simply HM, created a sensation in the field of neurology that led to many fundamental breakthroughs in understanding the importance of the hippocampus in formulating memories.

At the age of nine, HM suffered head injuries in an accident that caused debilitating convulsions. In 1953, when he was twenty-five years old, he underwent an operation that successfully relieved his symptoms. But another problem surfaced because surgeons mistakenly cut out part of his hippocampus. At first, HM appeared normal, but it soon became apparent that something was terribly wrong; he could not retain new memories. Instead, he constantly lived in the present, greeting the same people several times a day with the same expressions, as if he were seeing them for the first time. Everything that went into his memory lasted only a few minutes before it disappeared. Like Bill Murray in the movie
Groundhog Day
, HM was doomed to relive the same day, over and over, for the rest of his life. But unlike Bill Murray’s character, he was unable to recall the previous iterations. His long-term memory, however, was relatively intact and could remember his life before the surgery. But without a functioning hippocampus, HM was unable to record new experiences. For example, he would be horrified when looking in a mirror, since he saw the face of an old man but thought he was still twenty-five. But mercifully, the memory of being horrified would also soon disappear into the fog. In some sense, HM was like an animal with Level II consciousness, unable to recall the immediate past or simulate the future. Without a functioning hippocampus, he regressed from Level III down to Level II consciousness.

Today, further advances in neuroscience have given us the clearest picture yet of how memories are formed, stored, and then recalled. “
It has all come together just in the past few years, due to two technical developments—computers
and modern brain scanning,” says Dr. Stephen Kosslyn, a neuroscientist at Harvard.

As we know, sensory information (e.g., vision, touch, taste) must first pass through the brain stem and onto the thalamus, which acts like a relay station, directing the signals to the various sensory lobes of the brain, where they are evaluated. The processed information reaches the prefrontal cortex, where it enters our consciousness and forms what we consider our short-term memory, which can range from several seconds to minutes. (See
Figure 11
.)

To store these memories for a longer duration, the information must then run through the hippocampus, where memories are broken down into different categories. Rather than storing all memories in one area of the
brain like a tape recorder or hard drive, the hippocampus redirects the fragments to various cortices. (Storing memories in this way is actually more efficient than storing them sequentially. If human memories were stored sequentially, like on computer tape, a vast amount of memory storage would br required. In fact, in the future, even digital storage systems may adopt this trick from the living brain, rather than storing whole memories sequentially.) For instance, emotional memories are stored in the amygdala, but words are recorded in the temporal lobe. Meanwhile, colors and other visual information are collected in the occipital lobe, and the sense of touch and movement reside in the parietal lobe.
So far, scientists have identified more than twenty categories of memories that are stored in different parts of the brain, including fruits and vegetables, plants, animals, body parts, colors, numbers, letters, nouns, verbs, proper names, faces, facial expressions, and various emotions and sounds.

Figure 11
. This shows the path taken to create memories. Impulses from the senses pass through the brain stem, to the thalamus, out to the various cortices, and then to the prefrontal cortex. They then pass to the hippocampus to form long-term memories. (
illustration credit 5.1
)

A single memory—for instance, a walk in the park—involves information that is broken down and stored in various regions of the brain, but reliving just one aspect of the memory (e.g., the smell of freshly cut grass) can suddenly send the brain racing to pull the fragments together to form a cohesive recollection. The ultimate goal of memory research is, then, to figure out how these scattered fragments are somehow reassembled when we recall an experience. This is called the “binding problem,” and a solution could potentially explain many puzzling aspects of memory.
For instance, Dr. Antonio Damasio has analyzed stroke patients who are incapable of identifying a single category, even though they are able to recall everything else. This is because the stroke has affected just one particular area of the brain, where that certain category was stored.

The binding problem is further complicated because all our memories and experiences are highly personal. Memories might be customized for the individual, so that the categories of memories for one person may not correlate with the categories of memories for another. Wine tasters, for example, may have many categories for labeling subtle variations in taste, while physicists may have other categories for certain equations. Categories, after all, are by-products of experience, and different people may therefore have different categories.

One novel solution to the binding problem uses the fact that there are electromagnetic vibrations oscillating across the entire brain at roughly forty cycles per second, which can be picked up by EEG scans.
One fragment of
memory might vibrate at a very precise frequency and stimulate another fragment of memory stored in a distant part of the brain. Previously it was thought that memories might be stored physically close to one another, but this new theory says that memories are not linked spatially but rather temporally, by vibrating in unison. If this theory holds up, it means that there are electromagnetic vibrations constantly flowing through the entire brain, linking up different regions and thereby re-creating entire memories. Hence the constant flow of information between the hippocampus, the prefrontal cortex, the thalamus, and the different cortices might not be entirely neural after all. Some of this flow may be in the form of resonance across different brain structures.

RECORDING A MEMORY

Sadly, HM died in 2008 at the age of eighty-two, before he could take advantage of some sensational results achieved by science: the ability to create an artificial hippocampus and then insert memories into the brain. This is something straight out of science fiction, but scientists at Wake Forest University and the University of Southern California made history in 2011 when they were able to record a memory made by mice and store it digitally in a computer. This was a proof-of-principle experiment, in which they showed that the dream of downloading memories into the brain might one day become reality.

At first, the very idea of downloading memories into the brain seems like an impossible dream, because, as we have seen, memories are created by processing a variety of sensory experiences, which are then stored in multiple places in the neocortex and limbic system. But as we know from HM, there is one place through which all memories flow and are converted into long-term memories: the hippocampus. Team leader Dr. Theodore Berger of USC says, “
If you can’t do it with the hippocampus, you can’t do it anywhere.”

The scientists at Wake Forest and USC first started with the observation, garnered from brain scans, that there are at least two sets of neurons in a mouse’s hippocampus, called CA1 and CA3, which communicate with each other as a new task is learned. After training mice to press two bars, one after the other, in order to get water, the scientists reviewed the findings and attempted to decode these messages, which proved frustrating at first since the signals between these two sets of neurons didn’t appear to follow a pattern.
But by monitoring the signals millions of times, they were eventually able to determine which electrical input created which output. With the use of probes in the mice’s hippocampi, the scientists were able to record the signals between CA1 and CA3 when the mice learned to press the two bars in sequence.

Then the scientists injected the mice with a special chemical, making them forget the task. Finally they played back the memory into the same mouse’s brain. Remarkably, the memory of the task returned, and the mice could successfully reproduce the original task. Essentially, they had created an artificial hippocampus with the ability to duplicate digital memory. “
Turn the switch on, the animal has the memory; turn it off and they don’t,” says Dr. Berger. “It’s a very important step because it’s the first time we have put all the pieces together.”

As Joel Davis of the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations, which sponsored this work, said, “
Using implantables to enhance competency is down the road. It’s only a matter of time.”