I love u twinkelstar. Ur posts always give me so much hope for a better tomorrow.
the title is misleading, it says performance on memory tests could improve by 30% (a big fat COULD btw). it led me to think we would be scoring 130% on memory tests, at least thats how the title is worded, to get that sensational reaction.
a lot of new technology comes out and is sort of clunky and ineffective at the start, like cell phones or genesight. that doesn’t stop ppl from using these things, or should i say it hasn’t.
the whole electrical stimulation thing is kinda played out imho, we’ve been shocking szs and their brains for years, yet few if any studies show robust responses for this method. another question, how do they account for the placebo effect.
we need proven therapies which work based not on subjectively judged trials but an actual understanding of the underlying causes of the pathology. unfortunately this does not exist, we are weak on causes and cures and somewhat stronger on temporary treatments, hopefully it doesn’t get me banned to say this but even those rarely work.
also, i don’t want man made materials which might be clunky in or around my brain. im not robocop guys, i dont care if its a chip, don’t plug me into the matrix dr!
i also don’t want to have to choose between the blue pill or the red pill,
have you ever noticed when young teens first get high its like 70% in their imagination. give them a bottle of grape juice and call it wine. they’ll stumble all over the place, maybe even vomit.
so i don’t think i want the memory implant myself. that’s not to say it might not benefit someone, but i doubt itll be the next gps or cell phone, too many people are put off by the idea of wearing something clunky and being seen in public for any amount of time
They account for the placebo effect by turning the device on or off, and not telling the participants (or the people who are doing the testing).
I’m not sure what’s wrong with an up to 30% improvement. This would be for people who have memory deficits. DARPA is funding a project of this type - maybe this one, not sure - for soldiers with brain injuries. They’re not doing brain surgery on healthy people. Most of the research in this area is done with people who have another reason to have a brain implant, such as Parkinsons disease or epilepsy.
To give you an idea of how this is progressing, they were doing tests on rats in 2011, and primates in 2013, before progressing to human testing last year. So that’s a fairly respectable rate of progress, I would say.
The current technology is indeed clunky, but there’s no reason to expect it to stay that way. Just this year there have been developments in ultra low power miniaturized chips.
But I don’t think the future of this technology will be implants. It’ll be a few years, but they’re working on ways to stimulate the brain from outside the skull, for instance with a hat. Since the power requirements are very low, it is likely they will be able to do that. It might even run off your own kinetic energy or body heat.
I suspect there is a biological limit to memory power, so I don’t think we will get super humans. We could get improved performance though, like how athletes improve their performance with drugs or supplements. There’s still a limit, as far as we know. No one is doing a 2 minute mile, nor have we doubled human memory capacity. But if we can restore damaged brains to near normal function, or even just improve them significantly, it would relieve a lot of suffering. Improving an old person’s memory 30% might mean the difference between living at home and living in an assisted living facility.
So I don’t see any reason to be negative about it, other than that it’s not ready for prime time yet.
What about the memories you want de-boosted?
There’s some research on that, in mice, but I don’t think it will be applied to humans very soon.
In the future though, perhaps.
More likely it would involve trying to reduce the distress associated with recalling the memory.
If the research was done only on mice, I think humans with this brain implant will only remember where they put their cheese!
Haha. No, the one referenced in the article is in human trials.
But I do love cheese.
Ain’t nobody takin’ no drill to my head!
Lol I hope not.
There’s been some research on the placement of implants using techniques now used in placement of heart stents, where they go in through an artery in the leg. Using mri or other scanning techniques to get it in the right place. I believe that research is in dogs at this point.
This is dumb because coming from a neurological perspective, memory is not a file cabinet that you can just pull out a perfect representation of what was there before. Also it does not like facts or numbers or consistency. Once a memory is stored, it is put through a narrative to fit into your life story. Then every time you retrieve the memory, it changes.
“Boosting” your memory sounds like you would just have some psychotic problem arise because engineers scientists made some gadget somebody wanted to market without actually looking into it.