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Do we really need a remake of Paul Verhoeven’s 1990 sci-fi thriller Total Recall? No, but Hollywood is giving us one anyway, this time with Colin Farrell in the place of Arnold Schwarzenegger as the memory-challenged Douglas Quaid.
At the center of both movies is a company called Rekall that can implant fake memories and erase real ones with the help of a bulky, futuristic-looking machine. The original movie doesn’t explain how this happens, but that hasn’t stopped fans from speculating — something that carries extra weight when the fan is a professor specializing in both neuroscience and engineering.
“Here’s my crazy, mad scientist idea,” says Dr. Charles Higgins, a neuromorphic engineer at the University of Arizona. “If you’re going to program memories all over the brain without doing anything invasive like opening up the skull and sticking all kinds of probes in, maybe what they injected was nanorobots — lots of them, maybe millions or billions of them.
“Those go to preprogrammed locations all over the brain and the big machine we see in the movie is there to interact with the nanorobots, to tell them how to change synapses all over the brain in order to correspond with whatever the fake memory is going to be.”
We already know that people can be influenced to remember things that never happened, as in the famous “Lost in the Mall” experiment conducted by psychologist Elizabeth Loftus in which people were told four anecdotes that were supposedly from their childhood. Read the rest of this entry »
We like to think of ourselves as rational creatures. We watch our backs, weigh the odds, pack an umbrella. But both
Illustration by Noma Bar for TIME
neuroscience and social science suggest that we are more optimistic than realistic. On average, we expect things to turn out better than they wind up being. People hugely underestimate their chances of getting divorced, losing their job or being diagnosed with cancer; expect their children to be extraordinarily gifted; envision themselves achieving more than their peers; and overestimate their likely life span (sometimes by 20 years or more).
The belief that the future will be much better than the past and present is known as the optimism bias. It abides in every race, region and socioeconomic bracket. Schoolchildren playing when-I-grow-up are rampant optimists, but so are grownups: a 2005 study found that adults over 60 are just as likely to see the glass half full as young adults.
You might expect optimism to erode under the tide of news about violent conflicts, high unemployment, tornadoes and floods and all the threats and failures that shape human life. Collectively we can grow pessimistic — about the direction of our country or the ability of our leaders to improve education and reduce crime. But private optimism, about our personal future, remains incredibly resilient. A survey conducted in 2007 found that while 70% thought families in general were less successful than in their parents’ day, 76% of respondents were optimistic about the future of their own family.(See “The Case for Optimism” in TIME’s special: 10 Ideas That Will Change the World.) Read the rest of this entry »
How many times have you been sat revising for an exam wishing that you had the power of a perfect instantaneous memory? Well, for a tiny number of people that isn’t just a pipe dream. Known as mnemonists these individuals have unfathomable memories and data recall. This is the story of one of the first properly studied, and most interesting cases, Solomon Shereshevskii.
Born in Russia in 1886 to a Jewish family Shereshevskii, or simply ‘S’ as he is sometimes referred in literature externally appeared to lead a normal life. As an adult, after failing as a musician he embarked on a career as a journalist. It wasn’t till a chance meeting with the Neuropsychologist Alexander Luria (one of the founding fathers of the discipline) that his gift became apparent.
Alexander Luria
Shereshesvkii was reporting on a talk given by Luria. At one point Luria looked around the room and noticed that, unlike all the rest of the journalists, there was an individual not taking any notes. Luria confronted Shereshesvkii asking why he was not taking notes, at this point Shereshesvkii recited his entire talk back to word for word. Luria was stunned, as was Shereshesvkii who at this point had never realised that no one else had his perfect recall. This began a friendship and research partnership that lasted many years, with Luria conducting many studies into what might be the cause of his incredible abilities. Read the rest of this entry »
(This article could be bridge between Science and Meditation. This could be very important subject in the present world. It is, therefore, re-posted here from Newsweek)
What scientists can learn from ‘nothing.’
It took Sherlock Holmes to deduce the significance of the dog that didn’t bark.* So maybe it’s understandable that neuroscientists have traditionally ignored the brain activity that just hums away quietly in the background when the brain isn’t doing much of anything. Assuming this “default” or “resting” activity was meaningless random noise, they went so far as to subtract it out—and thus ignore it—on brain images such as PET scans and fMRIs.
Oops. Neuroscience is having its dark-energy moment, feeling as chagrined as astronomers who belatedly realized that the cosmos is awash in more invisible matter and mysterious (“dark”) energy than make up the atoms in all the stars, planets, nebulae, and galaxies. For it turns out that when someone is just lying still and the mind is blank, neurons are chattering away like Twitter addicts. The very idea of default activity was so contrary to the herd wisdom that when Marcus Raichle of Washington University in St. Louis, one of its discoverers, submitted a paper about it, a journal rejected it. That the brain might be so active in regions “doing nothing,” he says, had “escaped the neuroimaging establishment.” Now the establishment is catching up, with more and more labs investigating the brain’s default activity and a June meeting in Barcelona on brain mapping devoted to it. Read the rest of this entry »
Alexander Luria
Nepal - the country of the Buddha and the Mt. Everest 