• Question: Will I be able to record my brain like I can record a programme on television?

    Asked by lizziemuir to Andrew, Daniel, Hayley, Natalia, Peta on 16 Nov 2011.
    • Photo: Peta Foster

      Peta Foster answered on 15 Nov 2011:

      That is a very interesting question and i would like to think that one day you could.

      At the moment you can not but they have very recently been able to connect the brain to a computer style interface to recover motion of part of someones body… this is very early days but it is amazing since if we can get plugins for our own brain to fix problems… then maybe who knows how much we’ll be able to do with it. You might be able to fill a chip with information and plug that in similar to the matrix. Science is so exciting!

    • Photo: Andrew Cairns

      Andrew Cairns answered on 16 Nov 2011:

      The problem with technologies like this, and all AI (Artificial Intelligence) theories is that the processing power of computers and the amount of information stored has always been much less than that of the human brain. We are rapidly closing the gap though, offering new and exciting possibilities.

      To be honest, it actually scares me quite a lot – I don’t know if I want a computer that can think like me or live my life better than I can!

    • Photo: Daniel Scully

      Daniel Scully answered on 16 Nov 2011:

      The brain probably the most complicated thing we know about, and our understanding of how it works is very limited.

      Although it doesn’t seem like it to us, our memories are actually very unreliable, we don’t store things in a factual way like computers.
      Our memories of past events change based on experiences we’ve had since then, and there have been experiments where people have introduced false memories just by asking the person questions.

      Although computers are developing at a phenomenal rate, I suspect things like recording your brain hold more challenges than we might think.

    • Photo: Hayley Smith

      Hayley Smith answered on 16 Nov 2011:

      That’s an interesting concept.
      I don’t know that it will be possible anytime soon, but it is certainly something that you could see as a potential route that could be taken in the future.
      My concern with the idea is how would the information be stored. I mean, brains do a lot of processing all of the time – physical control, emotions, calculations, senses etc and what would be stored? Everything?!
      I’d be interested to understand how the brain’s response to smell, touch, taste, emotion – all the sensory and more subjective things – would be stored – but I’m sure someone will come up with a way (unless I’m being silly and it’s really not that complicated….comments/ideas welcome!)

      And when you came to want to “replay” what would you use for this? And more importantly – would it have fast-forward for the bits you didn’t like?!

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