A colleague of mine, Scott Coughlin, established a blog called a IT Thought of the Day. Afer reading an article in today's USA today about "augmented reality", here is my thought- coupling a Google for the brain with “augmented reality”.
How often have you recognized someone, but forgot their name ? Although this by itself may be embarrassing, memory loss can obviously have more dire consequences. Our brain is a sponge that absorbs a lot of information starting at an early age. Would it not be useful to be able to recall what is locally stored? Indeed, I find myself using Google to seek information about stuff that I was taught in school, but have forgotten. According to Gary Marcus, professor of psychology at New York University, “What we remember at any single moment depends heavily on the accidents of which bits of mental flotsam and jetsam happen to be active. Our mood, our environment, even our posture can influence our delicate memories.” Making our memories more accurate and more accessible would require a Google-like search engine which combines cue-driven promptings similar to human memory with the location-addressability of computers. Furthermore, there's no reason in principle why neural prosthetics could not incorporate this sort of functionality.
To take this one step further, you could upload this memory bank information to a smartphone which combines a camera, GPS and web access. The phone's camera can already "recognize" an object or place that a user is pointing to by overlaying the screen's image to location data. The travel industry is starting to exploit this new "augmented reality" technology to give tourist-friendly information about restaurants, sights and shops. This information could readily be displayed on the heads-up display of the wearer’s glasses. Imagine while you are talking to someone you have access to all his public information (e.g. Facebook etc.) and all the information that was shared in previous conversations or observations. A more far-future neural prosthetic might actually have a direct neural linkup to your brain, allowing you to see Google results on your retina. If everybody were on Facebook, we could know anybody’s name that we saw on the street – and more.
Opposing viewpoints about whether having a Google brain is a good thing or bad thing are discussed in Discover magazine's Google is Making Us Smarter and Atlantic Monthly's Is Google Making Us Stupid?.
There are additional cons. One issue that will have to be resolved is the downside of surfacing repressed memories which are usually traumatic in nature and block a painful time in one’s life. Another issue is that in general our Google brains also are changing to become overly dependent on the rewards of the Internet. According to neuroscientists stopping this frequent self-directed intellectual stimulation, may become hard to stop. Not only does this result in less downtime for our brains, but it also can lead to exhaustion. Many studies have shown how important downtime in the brain is for creative thinking, working memory in general, all complex problem solving, and of course, error detection.
After all, when we recognize someone we want to actually get their name right.
How often have you recognized someone, but forgot their name ? Although this by itself may be embarrassing, memory loss can obviously have more dire consequences. Our brain is a sponge that absorbs a lot of information starting at an early age. Would it not be useful to be able to recall what is locally stored? Indeed, I find myself using Google to seek information about stuff that I was taught in school, but have forgotten. According to Gary Marcus, professor of psychology at New York University, “What we remember at any single moment depends heavily on the accidents of which bits of mental flotsam and jetsam happen to be active. Our mood, our environment, even our posture can influence our delicate memories.” Making our memories more accurate and more accessible would require a Google-like search engine which combines cue-driven promptings similar to human memory with the location-addressability of computers. Furthermore, there's no reason in principle why neural prosthetics could not incorporate this sort of functionality.
To take this one step further, you could upload this memory bank information to a smartphone which combines a camera, GPS and web access. The phone's camera can already "recognize" an object or place that a user is pointing to by overlaying the screen's image to location data. The travel industry is starting to exploit this new "augmented reality" technology to give tourist-friendly information about restaurants, sights and shops. This information could readily be displayed on the heads-up display of the wearer’s glasses. Imagine while you are talking to someone you have access to all his public information (e.g. Facebook etc.) and all the information that was shared in previous conversations or observations. A more far-future neural prosthetic might actually have a direct neural linkup to your brain, allowing you to see Google results on your retina. If everybody were on Facebook, we could know anybody’s name that we saw on the street – and more.
Opposing viewpoints about whether having a Google brain is a good thing or bad thing are discussed in Discover magazine's Google is Making Us Smarter and Atlantic Monthly's Is Google Making Us Stupid?.
There are additional cons. One issue that will have to be resolved is the downside of surfacing repressed memories which are usually traumatic in nature and block a painful time in one’s life. Another issue is that in general our Google brains also are changing to become overly dependent on the rewards of the Internet. According to neuroscientists stopping this frequent self-directed intellectual stimulation, may become hard to stop. Not only does this result in less downtime for our brains, but it also can lead to exhaustion. Many studies have shown how important downtime in the brain is for creative thinking, working memory in general, all complex problem solving, and of course, error detection.
After all, when we recognize someone we want to actually get their name right.
4 comments:
See http://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/archive/2010/May/Pages/WearableAugmentedRealityDisplay.aspx for latest on augmented reality !
As a follow up, there have been some interesting developments in suppressing negative memories. See http://time.com/3194849/how-memories-are-made-and-manipulated/?xid=newsletter-brief
As another follow up, DARPA has funded HRL, IBM, and others to develop neuromorphic chips with the goal of making it possible for military drones to make sense of video and sensor data for themselves, instead of always having to beam it down to earth for analysis by computers or humans.
Post a Comment