TotalRewind™ (brain chip)
In 2015 we can rewind the TV, our CCTV footage and, if we wear an action cam, our latest adventure. However if we walk down the street and something happens we didn't quite catch, the annoying fact is that there is no 'real-life' rewind.
Background
In the not-too-distant future anyone who can afford it can have a chip implant under their skull. This allows everyone to access a 24/7, 5 minute delay loop so that anything that happens to you in the last 5 minutes can be played back with sound and vision in your brain. If necessary you can transfer the footage to an external device and download it again later.
Product details
A simple, minor operation places a tiny TotalRewind$^{\text{TM}}$ microchip inside your skull and in contact with the surface of your brain (its cortex).
On correctly entering the product code, the chip (which has biological components) starts to grow an outward-spreading network that eventually covers the entire surface of your brain with an ultrafine network of pseudo-bio threads and nodes. Effectively each node is a tiny biocomputer.
As you go about your daily business, these nodes detect the activity on the surface of your brain and continuously upload it to the chip.
The chip itself contains a vast memory array that can store the 2-D information from your cortex as a series of images. At today's level of technology, we can selectively store the past 5 minutes of your visual and auditory cortex. When you wish to play back your experiences, you simply activate the chip which projects the stored images back onto your cortex.
This means that, by temporarily closing your eyes (and blocking your ears) you can experience everything you saw and heard in the previous five minutes -- as though it is really happening!
WARNING - Do not do this while driving or operating machinery! It's best while relaxing in a darkened room however the system will work anywhere.
You may wish to carry blackout eye-masks with you in case you need an instant replay. You can rewind and slo-mo. You can upgrade to the super-IP (image-processing) version. This allows you to zoom and perform image enhancement in real-time (playback mode only). On review, you can decide whether to save the recording to an external device using wireless transmission or, by subscribing to our network, you can do this continuously. Note that if you do not save or store it, the 'footage' gets overwritten in a 5 minute loop.
Question
In scientific terms, how realistic is this proposal? In biological terms, will recording a movie of 2-D images of the cortex and then re-stimulating it with those images result in a playback as described?
What technological hurdles have to be overcome before this is reality? Is it theoretically possible under 2015 technology (even if it would cost billions) or, if not, what specific advances must we make.
What benefits and drawbacks must be considered?
This post was sourced from https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/27956. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
1 answer
In order to record video and audio it would need to be calibrated for each person and would need to intercept quite close to the ears and eyes, most likely to the relevant nerves themselves. This is because the human brain does a lot of visual processing which is not actually what you want if you just want a recording of events. This would also allow you to replay the recording by triggering the appropriate signals.
There would be no need to close your eyes though, the signal could just be super imposed or over-written by the recording.
So in other words, doing it be connecting to the cortex would be very hard or impossible. By connecting to the optical and auditory nerves though it is theoretically possible.
We couldn't do it with todays technology, however neural interfacing and similar technology is progressing fast.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain%E2%80%93computer_interface
For example:
In 2002, Jens Naumann, also blinded in adulthood, became the first in a series of 16 paying patients to receive Dobelle's second generation implant, marking one of the earliest commercial uses of BCIs. The second generation device used a more sophisticated implant enabling better mapping of phosphenes into coherent vision. Phosphenes are spread out across the visual field in what researchers call "the starry-night effect". Immediately after his implant, Jens was able to use his imperfectly restored vision to drive an automobile slowly around the parking area of the research institute.[29] Unfortunately, Dobelle died in 2004[30] before his processes and developments were documented. Subsequently, when Mr. Naumann and the other patients in the program began having problems with their vision, there was no relief and they eventually lost their "sight" again.
Realistically I would expect that over the next ten to twenty years such implants will start to become more and more common, initially used to treat disabilities and illness.
Once they are tested and in regular use for medical reasons it will start to become more and more feasible to use them for more and more minor usages.
This post was sourced from https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/28004. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
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