Ask A Genius 368 – The Future of Remembering
July 1, 2018
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Scott Douglas Jacobsen: We were talking off tape about the future of remembering. What are you taking into account when you are thinking of future of remembering?
Rick Rosner: Well I am thinking that in the future our brains will be augmented with. devices that. that will expand our abilities or help us maintain a decaying ability.
One of those abilities is a memory. One way of picturing the future is. when the brain starts to get old you go into some small business the way. Schwarzenegger walked into some joint in. his… I don’t know. what movie is that?
Jacobsen: Daycare movie, Daddy Daycare.
Rosner: Total Recall, you go to a joint and then 20 minutes they implant a whole new set of memories. and I just want to. it wasn’t Daddy day care.
Jacobsen: Daddy Day Care is the one where he says, “It’s not a tumor.”
Rosner: Really? Because in Total Recall he pulls something out of his nose. some kind of. anyway. I am just going to say that’s now how to remember. artificial remembering works. Where. for the past six weeks or so I have been tweeting. on Twitter I have been tweeting exerts from my memoir and trying to remember more stuff.
My guess is that. or artificial memory to most efficiently remember for you when your brain starts to go in the future. won’t be just one quick scan of the architecture of your brain, and what neurons connect to what other neurons. I am guessing that. it will have to ride with you. be a part of your brain for a long time and. witness a lot of your remembering over a period of months or ideally years. If you don’t actively remember something, that would be harder to find structurally via some short-term scan.
We have been talking about how memory is constructivist. and that the brain might be constructivist, that it is not. it may not. memories may be encoded in. not just individual neurons but in networks of neurons, that can also encode lots of other memories depending on. which pattern they are part of.
Memories might be encoded in patterns of neurons firing. You do not get a good idea of the pattern unless you get the neurons to fire to actually have that memory. So I am thinking in the future when you get artificial memory. you will get modules that will become part of your brain over time, learn how your brain works, it will take months and years.
Then there will probably be exercises, prompts in recovering memory; making you recall stuff like. Try to recall the year. What happened to you in 1982, you will be prompted and given images from 1982, at the memory parlor or at home when you are trying memory exercises. you will be given prompts about who is your third-grade teacher?
Your friends? Everything will be designed to actively get you to remember stuff. Because I believe those memories will be a lot clearer for the artificial memory to recover than some structural scan that just tries to map the dendritic connections in your brain. And that’s it.
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Authors[1]
Rick Rosner
American Television Writer
Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Editor-in-Chief, In-Sight Publishing
Footnotes
[1] Four format points for the session article:
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Rick Rosner 