Extracting and Replicating Human Memories

For the Grant Proposal summative project this year, my group studied ways to extract human memories and then save them onto a form of disk drive for access in the future. We thought that a system like this could aid people who had diseases such as Alzheimer’s.  Even though the research on the topic we did shows that this process is possible, I would like to discuss it further here, and find out if the process is actually possible or not.

Firstly, I must note that the extraction and replication of human memories is a very difficult task. The brain is a very complicated aspect of the human body and not just anyone can study its behaviours. In my grant proposal project, we looked at simple research papers and newspaper articles to figure out all the information we needed. In reality, my grant proposal group members and I would have not been able to perform the task that we set out to do, simply on the fact that dealing with the human brain, or the brain of any other animal is a very difficult task, and must only be done by professionals. Currently, highly respected individuals at the University of California Berkley (UC Berkley) are studying the process of extracting and replicating memories.

It is also important to add that this technology will not be available for a very long time. Tests done at UC Berkley show re-created images of what test subjects saw in movie trailers, but the images were rather blurry, and looked very different from the original images. As technology advances, humans will develop systems that are capable of finding clearer images.

Okay, here comes the question. Is it actually possible to recreate images from the human mind and replicate them? Well, researches at UC Berkley have showed us that it is possible.

As you can see the images shown to the test subjects were re-created although, they were rather blurry and some were inconsistent with the images the subjects were shown. However, this shows that the technology is possible. Now, can we take things to the next step and actually save these images on a form of disk drive (Hard Disk Drive, CD Rom etc.) In order to accomplish this, the technology to develop clear images from the human brain must first be developed, after that, I don’t see why it would be too difficult to save the images on to something like a hard drive. Images that are extracted from the human brain would probably be natively saved in a file type such as .jpg, .png or whatever is in use at the time the technology is developed. From there the images could be put directly onto a hard drive for viewing at any time making it easy to access past memories.

You might be thinking, “oh, this is great, I can view memories from my past now”. Unfortunately, this is not the case. This type of technology will probably only be available to highly respected medical institutions until further development is made. Nevertheless, this technology may be able to make its way into the hands of the average human being like you and me one day. In my grant proposal presentation, my group and I said that in the future we would like to make the process of extracting and replicating memories mobile. At the rate technology is advancing today, I think that this is completely possible. If we do get to the point where we can easily extract and replicate the memories of human beings, there should be no problem uploading them to a high security database where we can access those images from our brain at our own will.