Information Madness

Steven Spielberg, in his film `Minority Report’, showed us about how our mind can contain volumes of information and about people needing to know how to get at that information. It is human nature to learn to know what people think, dream or see inside their minds. It has been more than ten years since the release of Minority Report and the way it showed how connected ESP (Extra Sensory Perception) allowed humans with computers that could read minds, replay thoughts and predict the future. In some small ways, this may become a realization.

ESP and the prediction of future may be subjects bordering on fantasy but recent studies at the University of California in Berkeley showed how paralyzed patients and those with damaged speech could speak if their imagined conversations were reconstructed. In this way, doctors could talk to patients who were in coma. You could perhaps post your dreams on YouTube. Brains and computers will sync as easily as an iPad does with its Apps. It will allow people with paralysis or cerebral palsy to control neural prosthetic devices with their thoughts. The studies showed recordings made by computers translating the brain’s electric signals into simple words. Previous experiments had shown that thoughts could control things like a computer cursor but reconstructing language is a unique step forward.

Current technology for decoding brain activity may be primitive but it may change within a generation. There will be ethical concerns too with technological advancement like the forced extraction of information from the brain and this was the subject of another film released a couple of years back called `The Inception’ and about how people could be controlled through their dreams.