We experience and learn so many things over years. However, our memories may fail us. They fail in recalling a relevant fact that could have been very useful for accomplishing an immediate task at hand. e.g. My car tire has punctured on a busy street, but I cannot recall how to change it—though I remember reading about it in the manual.
It is likely that the memory is still alive somewhere in the deep corner of my brain. In this case, I maybe able to think hard and push myself to remember it. Such a process is bound to be slow and people on the street would yell at me for blocking it!
Sometimes our memories fail us “silently”. We don’t know that somewhere in our brain is information we can bring to bear on accomplishing a task on hand. What if I don’t even know that I have read a manual on changing car tires?!
Long term memory accessibility is thus an issue.
Now our short term memory is also very very limited (4-7 chunks at a time). In fact, short-cache of working memory might be a barrier to intellectual progress. It is then very crucial to inject relevant information in this limited working=memory space if we are to give a task our best, most intelligent shot.
Thus, I think about memory systems that can artificially augment the brain. I think of them from point of view of storing more information and indexing it better. I think of them for faster and more relevant retrieval.
I think of them as importable and exportable—I can share them with my friends (and learn how to change tires instantaneously). A pensieve like memory bank.
I thus think of “digital memories” that augment our relatively superior and creative compute brain processes. That is my (current) big idea.
This is basically the long-term goal of Neuralink as stated by Elon Musk. I am however very skeptical because of two reasons:
Natural selection did not design brains to be end-user modifiable. Even if you could accurately monitor every single neuron in a brain in real-time, how would you interpret your observations and interface with it? You’d have to build a translator by correlating these neuron firing patterns with observed behaviors, which seems extremely intractable
In what way would such a brain-augmenting external memory be superior to pen and paper? Pen and paper already allows me to accomplish working-memory limited tasks such as multiplication of large numbers, and I’m neither constrained by storage space (I will run out of patience before I run out of paper) nor by bandwidth of the interface (most time is spent on computing what to write down, not writing itself)
It seems there is an extreme disproportionality between the difficulty of the problem and the value of solving it.
I agree with you, I too am skeptical about Neuralink being useful anytime soon.
The augmentation in my vision, at the beginning at least, is external. I don’t attempt to modify the brain. I externally “record” a persons life. A simple manifestation of such a augment would be a wearable device: Google Glass.
It follows you around and forms “memories”. This external augmentation, then is able to store, index and retrieve relevant memory at scale, with speed, and aid brains normal abilities.
Hopefully its easy to see that such an external augmentation is better than pen-and-paper based memory system.
We experience and learn so many things over years. However, our memories may fail us. They fail in recalling a relevant fact that could have been very useful for accomplishing an immediate task at hand. e.g. My car tire has punctured on a busy street, but I cannot recall how to change it—though I remember reading about it in the manual.
It is likely that the memory is still alive somewhere in the deep corner of my brain. In this case, I maybe able to think hard and push myself to remember it. Such a process is bound to be slow and people on the street would yell at me for blocking it!
Sometimes our memories fail us “silently”. We don’t know that somewhere in our brain is information we can bring to bear on accomplishing a task on hand. What if I don’t even know that I have read a manual on changing car tires?!
Long term memory accessibility is thus an issue.
Now our short term memory is also very very limited (4-7 chunks at a time). In fact, short-cache of working memory might be a barrier to intellectual progress. It is then very crucial to inject relevant information in this limited working=memory space if we are to give a task our best, most intelligent shot.
Thus, I think about memory systems that can artificially augment the brain. I think of them from point of view of storing more information and indexing it better. I think of them for faster and more relevant retrieval.
I think of them as importable and exportable—I can share them with my friends (and learn how to change tires instantaneously). A pensieve like memory bank.
I thus think of “digital memories” that augment our relatively superior and creative compute brain processes. That is my (current) big idea.
This is basically the long-term goal of Neuralink as stated by Elon Musk. I am however very skeptical because of two reasons:
Natural selection did not design brains to be end-user modifiable. Even if you could accurately monitor every single neuron in a brain in real-time, how would you interpret your observations and interface with it? You’d have to build a translator by correlating these neuron firing patterns with observed behaviors, which seems extremely intractable
In what way would such a brain-augmenting external memory be superior to pen and paper? Pen and paper already allows me to accomplish working-memory limited tasks such as multiplication of large numbers, and I’m neither constrained by storage space (I will run out of patience before I run out of paper) nor by bandwidth of the interface (most time is spent on computing what to write down, not writing itself)
It seems there is an extreme disproportionality between the difficulty of the problem and the value of solving it.
I agree with you, I too am skeptical about Neuralink being useful anytime soon.
The augmentation in my vision, at the beginning at least, is external. I don’t attempt to modify the brain. I externally “record” a persons life. A simple manifestation of such a augment would be a wearable device: Google Glass.
It follows you around and forms “memories”. This external augmentation, then is able to store, index and retrieve relevant memory at scale, with speed, and aid brains normal abilities.
Hopefully its easy to see that such an external augmentation is better than pen-and-paper based memory system.