On Sunday, March 16, 2003 1:17 PM, Adrew Crystall wrote: > On 16 Mar 2003 at 17:06, Jose J. Ortiz-Carlo wrote: > > > >From: "Han Tacoma" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > > >The World's First Brain Prosthesis > > > > > >By DUNCAN GRAHAM-ROWE > > > > > > Posts like these are one of the reasons for being addicted to the > > list. Thanks, Han. > > > > > > > >Any device that mimics the brain clearly raises ethical issues. The > > >brain not only affects memory, but your mood, awareness and > > >consciousness - parts of your fundamental identity, says ethicist > > >Joel Anderson at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri. > > > > >From the article, I understand clearly that the job of the > > >hippocampus > > appears to be to "encode" experiences so they can be stored as > > long-term memories elsewhere in the brain. I also understand that the > > research team is merely (allegedly) copying its' behavior. But > > reading about the proposed accuracy of performance of this prosthesis, > > I can't help but wonder about the fact that if we can break down into > > such detail the structure of memory patterns, could we apply this > > technology into simulating them so much that we can implant new ones > > that may or may have not existed? > > The problem is "what is memory". We don't really understand much > about memory in the context of how the brain actually *stores* it.
My wife, Rosie Buse, holds a PhD. in Psych. and is a close friend of Dr. Bennet Murdock, Professor of Psychology (Emeritus) at UofT http://psych.utoronto.ca/~murdock/ who is doing some heavy research in the area of memory. Also, I'm including the area related to memory in the page: http://dynamo.psych.utoronto.ca/psych/grad/gradpercep.asp?pg=res Memory has been a focal area of research at the University of Toronto for decades, and many fundamental ideas about memory are based on work that was initially done here. For example, the notion that we remember better that which we process more deeply grew out of work on "levels of processing" done at the University of Toronto (Fergus Craik; Robert Lockhart). The idea that retrieval of information from memory is highly dependent on the manner in which that information was originally encoded - the "encoding specificity principle" (Endel Tulving) - was also developed here. Currently, memory researchers are asking the following questions. How does already learned information affect the processing of new, incoming information (Steve Joordens; Colin MacLeod; Marilyn Smith)? What role does working memory play in complex information processing (Meredyth Daneman)? What can memory modelling tell us about how the human memory system works (Joordens; Bennet Murdock)? To what extent is there a general neural system supporting episodic memory functions and is its operation dependent on the specific task (McIntosh; Tulving; Craik)? Are there multiple memory systems, differing in the extent to which we are aware of their operation (Joordens; Lynn Hasher; Eyal Reingold; Moscovitch)? How does memory change with age (Craik; Cheryl Grady; Hasher; Moscovitch; Philip Zelazo)? What happens in the brain's functional organization that results in these age-related memory changes (Craik; McIntosh)? and What can we learn about memory from the losses suffered in amnesia (Moscovitch)? How does memory affect processes of attention (Joordens)? How does attention regulate memory (Hasher)? Jennifer Ryan uses eye movement monitoring to investigate the function of multiple memory systems in the elderly and in brain-damaged patients. Using eye movement monitoring, she has recently discovered that the deficit in amnesia is not strictly one of consciousness, but rather, amnesia reflects an underlying deficit in relational memory binding. Cheers! -- Han Tacoma ~ Artificial Intelligence is better than none! ~ _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
