Memory Editing Technology Will Give Us Perfect Recall and Let Us Alter Memories at Will
Two new technologies are changing the meaning of memory, but who will control them? This story appeared in the February Issue of VICE magazine.
"There was a piano there, and someone playing. I could hear the song," the patient, S.B., said as his neurosurgeon touched an electrode to the surface of his exposed brain. To treat epilepsy, Wilder Penfield, an early-20th-century neurosurgeon, would remove sections of brain tissue while his patients—fully conscious but locally anaesthetized—told him what they experienced as he administered small shocks to different areas of their brains. When he stimulated one section, they saw shapes, colors, textures; another, and they felt sensations in various parts of the body.
But when he shocked one particular area of the cerebral cortex, patients relived vivid memories. With another jolt to the same area, S.B. recalled more of the piano memory: Someone was singing the Louis Prima tune "Oh Marie." As Penfield moved the electrode over, S.B. found himself strolling through some neighborhood of his past, "I see the 7 Up bottling company, Harrison Bakery." S.B. wasn't alone—other patients also recalled moments of their lives in intense detail. Nothing striking, nothing they'd planned to memorize: the sound of traffic, a man walking a dog down the street, an overheard phone call. They were more vivid and specific than normal memories, more like a reliving than a recollection. Penfield was convinced he'd found the physical site of memory, where memories were locked in place by tissue. "There is recorded in the nerve cells of the human brain a complete record of the stream of consciousness. All those things of which the man was aware at any moment of time are stored there," Penfield said in a 1958 Bell Labs film, Gateways to the Mind. "It is as though the electrode touched a wire recorder or a strip of film."
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/memory-editing-technology-will-give-us-perfect-recall-and-let-us-alter-memories-at-will-v24n1
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