Mad scientists figure out how to write memories to brains, take over Earth
By Darren Murph 
posted Oct 17th 2009 9:11PM
posted Oct 17th 2009 9:11PM
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this sounds less horrifying than my experience with snow leopard so far, at least
Dat was a bad putty tat !
@Uncontrol. You should try Windows7. It's even worse!
How about a way to burn a block into ur brain so that everything Doesn't become an Apple reference. There, you Made me do it. Happy?
so we are making fun of snow leopard now? what happened to vista?
They're not actually writing to the brain. They just replaced the chemical that's released by pain by one that's released by laser, which then causes the sensation of pain and the fly thinks it's hurt.
Watch out, gero is working in androids.
The picture for this story makes it look like he's working on Android 8. Personally, I'll hold out for Android 18.
Dude, Android 18 was hot. Too bad the Dragon Ball movie sucked so badly. But, if Android 18 was ever to be played in the live-action movie, my candidates are:
(1) Cameron Diaz
(2) Scarlet Johanson
Or Danica Patrick!
Actually, I think more like Dollhouse
You mean Dullhouse?
Actually, I think more like Dark City
Dark Angel, now that was a great show. Jessica Alba did a good job. Not to mention shes gorgeous. But then again i dont really trust fox with sci-fi shows, for that i have the sci-fi channel. BSG is one the best, if not the best sci-fi shows of all time.
The Devil Doll (1936) Using a process he has stolen from a mad scientist, a vengeful financier uses his mind to control tiny dolls made from chemically shrunk human victims. He then makes his dolls murder the men who sent him to Devils Island.
That's going to be the next Google technology... answer your questions directly into your brain. :D
This is such a bad idea that it really boggles the mind. The fact of the matter is that as soon as you take pain out of life, you take away pleasure too. Part of learning something is the experience that comes a long with the learning. It is impossible to separate them.
And besides, do we really think we know enough about the way brains work to feel comfortable writing on the sides of them with a laser without worrying about very serious side effects?
How are you taking away pain? Unless you mean physical pain at the exact moment it happens? Otherwise you can still have the memory of an emotionally painful even, or the memory of incredible pain when an event occurs.
The fact of the matter is that as soon as you take pain out of life, you take away pleasure too.
This is such a bullshit statement, it boggles the mind. "You can't have pleasure without pain!!!1" Yeah right. You go right ahead and feel all the pain you want, buddy. Meanwhile, the rest of us will be hanging out in our Sensorama-3000s getting non-stop handjobs from virtual supermodels while downloading the collective knowledge and skill sets of every great thinker in history...while high as a kite.
Seriously though, all they're doing here is messing around with fly brains. Fly brains are a great deal less complex than human brains. It will be quite some time before anything like this could ever be done to a human brain, if ever. Or in the second half of this century if you believe Ray Kurzweil. I wonder if people our age in 1909 could even conceive of many of the things that everyone in 2009 takes for granted?
It isn't that there is no pleasure without pain, it is that without pain, there's no perspective with which to enjoy that which pleases you.
For example. You could enjoy eating peanut butter and jelly more than anything, but the key to that statement is "more than anything." If you never ate anything else, the pleasure you take in eating peanut butter in jelly is non-significant.
The answer, as always, lies in relativity. I think the idea the original poster is getting at is that this may eliminate relativity in some way. Anyway, seems unlikely. I doubt these scientists really have any idea what they imprinted on that fly's brain.
@CountNon:
Don't jump to conclusions. If you read the article, the researchers have used this as a model to locate cells that are involved in memory. The researchers are not looking to "create" memories (and it is questionable if they have, in the sense of a memory as we experience them), rather simply to understand the processes involved in memory formation. This has a number of greater roles in a number of diseases, including Alzheimer's disease. If we can understand how memories form in organisms that we don't mind manipulating, we can assume that evolution didn't reinvent the wheel, and thus the mechanisms of memory formation are conserved. In this way, by understanding fruit flies, we can better understand ourselves. This is the basis of all model organism research, which comprises a great majority of biological research.
The point is, don't jump to silly conclusions because an Engadget editor made a joke. Science isn't out to get you, and we scientists do have ethics.
@J:
Another bullshit statement. Where do you people come from? The last I checked, eating peanut butter and jelly did not involve pain. Although your comments do. The reason you gain pleasure from eating a PB&J is because your body is hungry and needs fuel, and that PB&J satisfies its craving. SATISFACTION ITSELF is what creates the pleasure response...it isn't because you are in pain and need some pleasurable experience to offset that pain or vice versa. Get a grip. The only thing more painful to me than actual physical pain is amateur post-modern philosophical equivocators.
@Durr Hurr: Another bullshit statement. Hunger _does_ involve pain.
This "satisfaction" you mention, comes from a lack of hunger, nothing else.
Assume a fresh brain with absolutely no previous knowledge. If you completely eliminate the pain of hunger and starvation, the brain will never even learn to eat, and it will eventually die without having felt anything wrong until the very last moment.
Why? Because since there was no pain to begin with, eating, which would have otherwise eliminated the pain, does not cause any change in the feelings whatsoever, and thus the brain does not see any benefit to eating, and thus it feels no pleasure.
@J
Exactly, my point is that we only know pleasure because we know pain at the same time. If life was all massage beds and hand jobs from beautiful Swedish supermodels then those things would become the norm and would cease to be pleasurable. We only percieve things as good or bad as a result of how good or bad they are relative to some baseline. If you think otherwise then you're fooling yourself.
@remotecontrolled
You're right, this work has important and non-scary applications. If we can make the lives of Alzheimer's patients better then wonderful. My concern is not with where this technology is going tomorrow or the day after, but where it is going in a century. I always get a little nervous when someone starts fucking around with people's (or other animals as the case may be) brains, the potential applications down the road are a little nerve wracking to me. The only way we'll avoid the world turning into some Orwellian dystopia is if people pay attention and are willing to look beneath the surface of announcements like this. It's all well and good to accuse me of "jumping to silly conclusions" now, but complacence will be the end of the human race as we know it. I would like to avoid that.
@durrhurr
seriously, you're going to accuse us of being post-modern equivocators? *sigh*.....
Why do people bother climbing up the K2? The way up is cold, dangerous, tough and painful. And the summit is hardly anything to write home about either. There's a nice view, but not enough oxygen to breath and for a large part it's simply more coldness and pain.
Yet people do climb the K2 and success is met with great euphoria. The only thing that is plearuble about the summit is the amount of pain you had to go through before. So yes, pain and pleasure are intertwined.
Can anyone say matrix? I'll download the kung fu pack please
yeah i was hoping for something more along the lines of portable home mind programming headset. handy for learning a subject, studying and the occasional kung foo fight.
'We need guns. Lots of guns.'
It's actually more akin to Total Recall.
Yeah, my first thought was "Woah ... I know kung fu!"
Jesus H Christ! You where turned into a Snow Leopard?
I'm first in line for the Megan Fox memory.
I'll take the Rihanna, please.
@ Goliano
I'd hit that...
This is the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard.
We're f*cked.
A fruit fly's brain is like a tiny pimple... I am surprised he did not engrave it into oblivion with the laser...
How much do I have to pay for the night with Natalie Portman to be implanted?
I predict a shortage of tin and aluminum in the coming days.
God (can't?) won't put memories of hard lessons in our minds without us having to suffer through it. Unless he does do that? Hmm I'll never know .. well not for some time at least.
Assuming God exists, of course. (And has lasers. Though, if I believed in God, I'd like to think he's got lasers. He'd have more street cred.)
Wait how would this work on humans? Because they would know the memories are fake, but they would still have them... *brain explodes*
Think: "I know Kung Fu"
No. Think - Dreams. You could have a memory of what you saw in a dream. But you know it didn't really happen, because it doesn't hold up against your real memories.
Nice picture of Kaz Hirai, by the way. I imagine that's the face he made when he first saw the sales figures for the Playstation 3 in 2006.
I'd love to have some fake memories of vacations that I never got to take. Like a trip to Mars, I've never been to Mars.
i just watched total recall last night its a cool coincidence that i see this comment lol
I have. It sucked.
'...for the memory of a lifetime; Recall, Recall, Recall...'
g-g-g-git yeh a$$ to Mahs.
Mars will blow your mind.
Your upgrade to Snow Leopard was painful? I've done it a few times now, and it was on the order of three clicks for me. You might be doing it wrong..
That's what she said!
Did you actually click the explanatory links? Have you tried logging in as guest?
Eurasia has ALWAYS been at war with Eastasia
+1
this.
Like we've always been at war with Iraq. Wait, I think it's Afghanistan now.
how is upgrading to snow leopard painful. Darren Murph sounds like a windows fanboy who tires to put down apple stuff at every chance he can, even if it has nothing to do with the topic or isn't even true at all. Raise your standards Engadget, this should be a neutral board (but ill let you away with hating monster cable)
i don't know that it's supposed to be neutral. It's a blog. My blog isn't neutral. They don't claim to be neutral. I think it's good that the different writers have different opinions on things.
The Maoists have been experimenting with this technology for several years.
They are producing a home USB version for oppositional children.
This explains Hillary Clinton's claims about her Iraq visit.
I'm appalled that no one mentioned The Giver. Have we sunk so low that we cannot remember our Newbery Medal-winning books?
I love that book! :D
So where exactly in the book did they etch memories into the kids head with a laser? I seem to have missed that part, damn cliff notes.
as i said before a string of events that will lead to the end "2012" this is one of them.
Get your y2k bunker cleaned out.... Remember when all the world's computers were going to stop working. planes would just fall out of the sky. Remember those idiots buying 3000 gallons of water at wal-mart to stock in their bunkers. 2012 is just another stupid end of the world theory. life is not written yet, 2012 won't be the end all be all.
@derrik - You're right. Thanks to a forward-thinking company policy, a little elbow grease and some human sacrifice, the Mayans are ahead of schedule. The End is now projected to occur during the 2nd fiscal quarter of 2011.
Id like the tantric sex with kama sutra arts downloaded to my brain & 10 different languages with a dash of martial arts please.
It begs the question of whether we are a lot more than the sum of our memories - which are all we have left of experience.
Though I wonder if the emotional connection to those memories is as relevant when they are burned on.
Also... where are they getting these memories to burn on?
Wouldn't you need to be able to read them off first?
If they read all my memories and burn them onto a newborn, am I immortal?
And will I finally then, as I grow up, know when I am 15 what I knew when I was 40?
... and will that increase or decrease teen pregnancy rates?
"I know Kung Fu"
yes!
So. . . If I store an awesome joke on my laser, could a strap it to a shark and the then the sharks with fucking lasers would just make everyone laugh their asses off?
Oh the feeding frenzies the sharks could have.
It's religion in a laser. Nifty.
I AM NOT QUAID!!!
Why upgrading to Snow Leopard. I installed snow leopard on my MacBook, 3 Mac minis & also my media's 28 iMac systems at college every upgrade went seamless. I think it should be "Windows users upgrading from Xp to Windows 7", As they will have to format there drive and install everything back on, upgrade apparently wont work if your running Xp. only 20% of windows users ever upgraded from Xp to vista on there machines. Where as 70% of Mac users already have upgraded to Snow Leopard
Yeah, but I already know what pain feels like...
"Urrgh! I'm alive! Must... annoy Ray Romano!"
I dunno...I'll believe it when it happens. This is probably one of those things that sounds amazing, then when you read into the details it ends up being only 1% of what you imagined it and really insignificant. This won't happen for a long time and maybe never; atleast being able to insert an actual memory of something.
Actually, I just decided to read the "Read" link, and I'm right. The flies they used were genetically modified so that "their nerve cells fired when lit up with a laser". That's very far from inserting memories.
"I know Kung Fu"
Can you say Dual Trace System?
They should also work with fire flies. They might get some bright ideas! :P
Good ideaand good path for the future
Who was that - writing a novell about the future when people receive their knowledge straight to the brain? Asimov? Sheckley? The littlle thing here is that there is no way to correlate the knowledge to experince and analytical skills. Which is why the pople that *cannot* get knowledge imprinted still have to suffer the long say - but are the only people to produce new knowledge.
So i say - go ahead!
Gero Miesenböck is his name? Interestlyingly, in Japanese that could mean loosely: "I won't show you my barf."