“Shut up. Just shut up. Shut up, shut up, shuttity up up up.” It’s time for (delayed) science from Doctor Who S08E05.
There was quite a bit of sciencey stuff to choose from in this episode, but I’ve taken inspiration from our very own computer augmented human, Psi. He’s not constrained by a potentially fallible and limited human memory, as he’s able to download information directly into his head – and if there’s something he’s eager to forget, he can just delete it!
https://twitter.com/JadeMWong/status/515257055251533824
So will we ever be able to do anything like this? Scientists have recently started developing so-called ‘mind-reading’ technology – an extension of existing brain scanning techniques. Participants are shown images and video clips whilst their brains are scanned, then their thoughts are decoded and translated into words via an algorithm. At the moment it’s only quite rough, but it does show uncertainty by varying font size (the larger it is, the more certain the machine is). Perhaps unsurprisingly, some companies are trying to use this technology for commercial benefits (e.g. marketing), but researchers are trying to use it to find out more about how the brain works – given how important this organ is, it seems ridiculous how little is known about it.
A project to map the brain began in America last year, in the hope that we might learn more about its activity and what happens in conditions like autism and schizophrenia. It has been billed as the brain version of the Human Genome Project. There were such high hopes for the HGP – thoughts that we would find all sorts of genes for diseases, and thus their cures – which have thus far failed to fully deliver (hugely unrealistic hopes, in hindsight!). With any luck, the BrainMap project will prove to be of clinical use sooner rather than later.
As ever, there is competition: the Human Brain Project has been launched in Europe. It’s an international collaboration looking at different areas of brain research – supercomputers will be used to see which genes are turned on (or, ‘expressed’) by nerve cells, and a model of the human brain will be made in a silicon substrate, amongst other things. Researchers hope to simulate brain diseases (like Alzheimer’s) on computers to test new medications.
But what about memory? It seems like it could be a long way off. We don’t even know exactly where and how memories exist in the brain yet! The ‘hippocampus’ is involved but, as with so many things, details are sketchy. Ted Berger and Sam Deadwyler have experimented with actually inserting memories into rats (via electrical signals stimulating the hippocampus), as well as blocking memories (by disabling the hippocampus). Ed Boyden (leader of the Synthetic Neurobiology Group at MIT) has found, with his colleagues, a protein that can convert light into electricity: channelrhodopsin. They’ve started using this in nerve cells; mapping electrical impulses and creating memories in computer code form. You’d think this would be something to build on, but it may not – it seems that memories somehow disappear when we’re not using them! Now you can understand why researchers don’t know exactly where they’re kept yet…
So it may be a while before we can store our memories on USB sticks after all!
Excuse me. Time to have a think about the science of ‘The Caretaker’…
deblogscience 