Memory projector

Introduction:

Imagine being able to scroll through your memories like a social media feed, to be able to

perfectly recall everything you've ever learned to immediately access every section of your

life history. It’s like having access to relive the best experiences of your life and maybe share

it with others. Having a device that will project your memories will revolutionize the

education and medical industries as well as the overall lives of the public. Students will be

able to revisit lectures whenever they please, patients of memory loss could use this device to

be reminded of things they may not be able to remember. The question is, is this possible?

UC Berkeley scientists have developed a system to capture visual activity in human brains

and reconstruct it as digital video clips. This is the first step in making this dream product a

reality. Eventually, this process will allow you to record and reconstruct your own dreams on

a computer screen. Professor Jack Gallant—UC Berkeley neuroscientist and coauthor of the

research published in the journal Current Biology—"this is a major leap toward

reconstructing internal imagery. We are opening a window into the movies in our minds."

[ CITATION Jes11 \l 17417 ] .

Today, it’s all about making memories, enjoying and capturing experiences but we’re so busy

trying to record them we lose the opportunity to fully appreciate it in the moment. With the

memory projector device a reality you would never have a moment unrecorded: when you

have the perfect night, your child takes his first steps you can enjoy the moment without

worrying about taking out your smartphone/camera out to capture it. This would give a whole

new meaning to the concept of ‘home movies.’ Your eyes are the camera, your brain the

memory card and the memory projector your media and medium.

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Discussion:

Memory is defined as our ability to encode, store, retain and subsequently recall information

as well as past experiences in the human brain. It can be thought of in general terms as the

use of past experience to affect or influence current behaviour. On average a human brain

comprises of about one billion neurons. Individually each neuron forms about 1,000

connections to other neurons, equalling to more than a trillion connections. Now doing the

math, if each neuron was only capable of helping store a single memory, running out of space

would be a problem. You might only have a few gigabytes of storage space, just like in an

iPod, a smartphone or a simple USB flash drive. However, neurons combine so that each one

helps with many memories at a time, exponentially increasing the brain’s memory storage

capacity to something closer to around 2.5 petabytes (or a million gigabytes). For arguments

sake, if your brain worked like a digital video recorder in a television, 2.5 petabytes would be

enough to hold three million hours of TV shows. You would have to leave the TV running

continuously for more than 300 years to use up all that storage.[ CITATION Pau10 \l 17417 ]

That’s a lot of TV. The average lifespan of a human is 79 years [ CITATION Goo17 \l 17417 ]

out of the 300 years’ worth of TV the brain stores in-depth memories of an individual with

great detail. It is this ability to store detail that this product will benefit from.

However, the brain never ceases to impress us with its mysterious complexities. There is a

little twist about the way memories are made. Memory isn't like a video or film, faithfully

recording a sequence of minute details and storing it all intact. Rather, it's a far more complex

procedure, which preserves brain space by filtering out minor details while still allowing us

to string together relevant information about specific events. So at a basic level a memory is a

set of circumstances, details and characteristics strung together—the brain can reconstruct

events by triggering specific strings in "convergence/divergence zones" and then accessing all

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the scattered details attached to the string. We begin to lose memories as we age when our

brains have too much of certain molecules called beta amyloids. While at low levels these

molecules are required for our normal memory system, high levels hurt inter-brain

communication. [ CITATION DAV16 \l 17417 ]

This information entails that the projector would require the brain to be given the appropriate

stimulus to access the right memory at the specified time. Also, as time goes by and age kicks

in, the projector may need to inject beta amyloids to ensure the ‘quality’ of the memory

remains ‘HD’ or so to say.

UC Berkeley scientists figured out a way to turn the way our brains interpret visual stimuli

into a video, and the result is amazing. The researchers used functional Magnetic Resonance

Imaging (fMRI) to measure the blood flow through the brain's visual cortex. Different parts

of the brain were divided into volumetric pixels or voxels. Finally, the scientists built a

computational model which describes how visual information is mapped into brain activity.

In exercise, test subjects viewed some video clips, and their brain activity was recorded by a

computer program, which learned how to associate the visual patterns in the movie with the

corresponding brain activity. Then, test subjects viewed a second set of clips. The movie

reconstruction algorithm was fed 18 million seconds of random YouTube videos, which were

used to teach the program how to predict the brain activity evoked by film clips. Finally, the

program chose 100 clips which were most similar to the movie the subject had seen, which

were merged to create a reconstruction of the original movie. The result is a video that shows

how our brain sees things, and at moments it's eerily similar to the original imagery.

Recording our dreams and "reading" the minds of coma patients requires a lot of work still,

as current technology only enables scientists to interpret brain activity while the test subject is

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watching a movie. Ultimately, it could be used to decode how our brain processes visual

events in everyday life or, perhaps, our dreams. [ CITATION STA11 \l 17417 ] This

breakthrough was made in 2011, six years down the line scientists have continued to work on

this greatly increasing the possibility of this memory projector becoming a reality in the near

future.

Conclusion:

Research and the efforts of scientists from various institutions are proof that this memory

projector can and will be a possibility in the near future. With the continuous advancement of

technology and the in-depth knowledge of how the brain works, this dream product will soon

be a reality. Personally, I can see it as a tiny handheld portable device, similar to the size of a

smartphone that is wirelessly connected to a set of sensors possibly aligned in a head band

that apply the required stimulus to instigate the required memory. Once the memory has

formulated the portable projector would project the “movies in our mind” like it would

project a regular movie. The person projecting the memory would have full control to

showcase only the details/aspects of the memory they are comfortable with – as the projector

is connected to their mind they will be able to formulate the memory the way they want too.

As a product the projector is essentially a technological device, which entails it will follow

the technological adaption lifecycle. It will be the innovators who will first be interested in

buying the product no matter how highly priced it is. Initially the pricing strategy will be high

as the technology will be one of its kind and strategized as a premium product. As soon as it

grows from the early adaptors to the early majority the competitive edge will be gone and the

monopoly will end. It is then that the price may drop. However with all of its benefits and the

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uniqueness of the product no price is high because you know what they say, you can’t put a

price on memories.

Suggestions:

1. Product/device should be portable and wireless. Ensuring it’s light and user friendly

2. For people with poor memory or of a certain age, the projector may need to inject beta

amyloids to ensure the ‘quality’ of the memory remains ‘HD’ or so to say. This will

require a source of these amyloids and a method of injecting them into the

bloodstream.

3. The device could have the ability to save these memories in external storage devices.

References:

Bibliography
1. Diaz, J. (2011, 9 22). GIZMODO. Retrieved 12 21, 2017, from GIZMODO:
https://gizmodo.com/5843117/scientists-reconstruct-video-clips-from-brain-activity

2. Google. (2017, December 20). Human/Lifespan. Retrieved December 20, 2017, from
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3. HIRSCHMAN, D. (2016). The Human Hard Drive: How We Make (And Lose) Memories.
Retrieved 2017, from Big Think: http://bigthink.com/going-mental/the-human-hard-
drive-how-we-make-and-lose-memories

4. Reber, P. (2010, May 1). What Is the Memory Capacity of the Human Brain?
Retrieved December 20, 2017, from Scientific American:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-is-the-memory-capacity/

5. SCHROEDER, S. (2011, September 23). Scientists Turn Brain's Visual Memories into a
Mind-Blowing Video. Retrieved December 20, 2017, from Mashable:

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http://mashable.com/2011/09/23/scientists-brain-visual-
memories/#7McN29SRZkqY

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previously-thought
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