Musings

I read a news release today from UCLA that reported a major advance in our understanding of how memories are formed. According to the report, the researchers used a fluorescent protein that can change from green to red when exposed to ultraviolet light. They flashed the cells with light, so that any proteins that already existed turned red. But when the scientists induced the cells to form memories, they saw new green proteins appear under the microscope.

Interestingly, the new proteins were created on both sides of a given synapse, and the affected synapses were not contiguous, but appeared to form a random pattern in the brain. Unlike a computer, the brain appears to do its thing by manipulating such patterns to form thoughts and perform computations. By distributing the stored patterns across the brain structure in a seemingly random way, nature has provided us with some protection if a specific region of the brain is disabled or damaged. This is absolutely amazing to me, and it made me think about the near-term potential for artificially reprogramming the brain.

This means creating memories of events that never happened, or inducing ‘education’ without the need to study or attend lectures. You become an instant expert in any discipline or art. This is accomplished by injecting RNA that is ‘preconfigured’ to create and fold proteins in a specific sequence that would attach to unassigned synaptic junctions.

I can see a likely new discipline that would be hotly pursued: Conditional Psychophysiology. Think about the ability to rehabilitate criminals through ‘reeducation’, the removal of long-term conditioned reflexes due to emotional trauma, or the more Orwellian aspect of making citizens more accepting of social or political philosophies. I have no doubt that such a ‘medical’ technology will be available within the next twenty years.

Like gunpowder or the atom bomb, this enabling technical advance is fraught with immense promise and immense danger as well. In fact, all aspects of the coming ‘Singularity’ are bipolar in this respect; the greatest danger being the demise of the Human race as it may become supplanted by selfish thinking machines that are more intelligent than we are. Perhaps the ability to ‘flash reprogram’ the Human brain will buy us a little time to deal effectively and fairly with our mechanical progeny.