Thoughts Back-up

[Jet2]

We have all sorts of thoughts come to our head through a day even if we are asleep.

We sense, think, recognize, wonder, react, read, search, imagine, count, alert, remember...at any time. Our brain seldom stop function unless we fell unconscious, or does it?

There are numerous actions / functions happening up in our head everyday and we tend to forget most of them afterward (even though they are somehow got stored in our brain).

I am just wondering if we could have a machine (computer?) that can monitor and capture all our thoughts once they appear. If we could do it, then we can back up our thoughts for a later check or review.
How cool is it?

[alexander]

However it is possible to do so, at this current moment in technology we do not have the means nor the technology that has means of doing so.

We know a great deal about how our brains function and work, we know about the internal structure of the brain and how the electochemical organ functions. What we don't know is how we know stuff. Our brain stores information differently then a hard drive or a computer in genera, a hard drive stores the data in series of 1s and 0s, it can later go and look at the sequence to determine what exactly the data is. Our brain however stores the data, using what the neurologists call a "dynamic, meta-stable" process, where the data is duplicated and stored in multiple areas of the brain; where and how the data is stored defines how and whether the data will be retrieved later on. This model has its advantages, and disadvantages, disadvantages is that we would have to interface all those networks in order to be able to retrieve any data, the advantages are the quickness of data retrieval and search. Your name for example is stored in so many networks of the brain that it makes it close to impossible to forget, however each component is maluable and transient, and thus it is theoretically possible to forget your own name.

Oh also i don't think scientists have yet to devise a way to retrieve data, since it is stored in chemical bonds (most neurologists believe that the data is stored by creating new protein in your brain, however recent hypothesees have been pointing more to not creating new proteins, but rather changing the shape of the ones in the brain already)

[Jet2]

Thank you Alexander for the details.

May be one day if we could capture and decode human brian wave at the instance when it occurs, we could then copy our thoughts digitally. Hopefully by that time we would have a much powerful computer to save all the 'files'...

[tierradelfuego]

Originally Posted by Jet2

May be one day if we could capture and decode human brian wave at the instance when it occurs, we could then copy our thoughts digitally. Hopefully by that time we would have a much powerful computer to save all the 'files'...

Thoughts are more than just the electromagnetic/electrochemical signals; you would need much information about the underlying structure. So even if you could do a good job of recording "brain waves", you would still need a detailed model of the underlying human brain to understand many thoughts. For example, you can capture lots of information from a computer by recording the electromagnetic signals that it leaks; in some cases, that may be enough to understand a particular function (e.g., graphic data), but it may fall far short of providing a significant understanding of the functioning of the underlying computer hardware/software.

I would wager that an artificial organic brain should be possible sometime in the future, but capturing the "content" from a particular person's brain seems much more difficult.

[Jet2]

I am listening to [Holly Mother] by Eric Clapton and Parvarotti, having a piece of chocolate Swiss roll and a cup of green tea while I typing this reply to you tierradelfuego. At the same time a piece of copy is waiting for me to revise at the desktop and my love one is busily uploading photos to her on-line shop. Oh, it is such a beautiful day, sunny and cool. This is Fall here in Shanghai...oops, MSN, email again...

So I have tried. Even just a few minutes, I put my thoughts (what I'm going through) on to the computer. Yes, it's hard. Because I type not fast enough to catch the ideas which are poping up and down in my head....

[alexander]

first of all, tierradelfuego (nice name), that is basically what i said above in slightly more details. And secondly, we have been studying the brain by monitoring electromagnetic impulses for a long while now...ever heard of MRI or fMRI, what about EEG, and finally what about Magnetoencephalography, one of the most modern ways of studying the brain? Ofcourse there are ways to monitor chemical signals to some extent; PET and SPECT scans do that...

[Turtle]

Originally Posted by Jet2

...I am just wondering if we could have a machine (computer?) that can monitor and capture all our thoughts once they appear. If we could do it, then we can back up our thoughts for a later check or review.
How cool is it?

The problem I see is that any time spent in review is time spent not having thoughts not yet archived.

[alexander]

my question is, how much storage space does it take to back up my thoughts and can i rsync them back over ssh?

[freeztar]

Originally Posted by alexander

can i rsync them back over ssh?

Or better yet, you could synch them into another person's head!
It would make getting your point across a LOT easier.

[Jet2]

Or better yet, you could synch them into another person's head!
It would make getting your point across a LOT easier.

And then we can really read people's mind if they let us to...