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If you haven't watched season 3 of Sherlock yet don't worry there are no life or death
spoilers in here. Just a bit of character description and some world changing implications.
But watch that first if you're worried.
With that out of the way. Are Sherlock Holmes and Charles Magnussen the future of memory?
But I mean without all that Eye flicking. Seriously? Did you have to make him into eye
flicking? And licking people and peeing on things. Gross.
Hi My name is Emily and this is BlinkPopShift.
In the finale of the third season of the BBC's tumblr famous series Sherlock everyones favorite
master consulting detective meets his match in Charles Augustus Magnussen, the Napoleon
of blackmail.
Magnussen has amassed a huge library of headline breaking secrets he is using to control most
of the major powers in the western world.
Much the episode is dedicated to tricking the audience into thinking Magnussen uses
a technological memory aid,
perhaps reading the information off a pair of not google/google glasses,
but those deliciously incriminating blackmail files are however, and here's the only spoiler
in this video, are stored not in Magnussens wearable computer or even wifi connected secure
server, but in his head.
All the information he has collected is stored using a technique called a memory palace,
where memories are associated with an imagined physical location making large detailed bit
of information easily accessible and retainable.
Sherlock also uses the technique to solve his cases but what if you could do the same?
Will the seamless brain computer interfaces change everything about how we think, remember,
and use information?
For a bit of historical perspective lets go back to the invention of the first information
technology: writing.
Plato decried the invention of writing saying.
"This invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it,
because they will not practice their memory."
From the position of oral tradition maybe he's right, but think of all we did once we
unburdened our minds of the responsibility remembering the entire cultural legacy of
our species.
Once we stopped having to remember word for word our origin stories and myths and gods
and medicines we spend our mind more efficiently.
Plato may have disagreed but heres how James Gleick put it in his book The Information.
"We may wish to understand the rise of literacy both historically and logically, but history
and logic are themselves both products of literate thought. Writing permits whole new
architectures of information. Among them history, law, business, mathematics, and logic."
And thats the point.
While being decried as the death of momery Writing was actually a tool which led to new
means of organizing information. New means so powerful we literally can not now understand
the world without them. We got all that information out of our heads and down on paper where the
ideas and words could be analyzed, recombined, and restructured. Writing gave thought organization.
Now back to Sherlock and the brain computer interface.
Sherlocks prowess is not just in his excellent observational skills but also in his capacity
to whole in mind a huge quantity of context.
As Mag proves, Individual facts are all well and good but only in the context of big data
do those facts become powerful.
Sherlocks near instant access to and seamless use of
statistical models of human behavior, maps, decompositional data,
weather, the chemical composition of various kinds
of tobacco, and on and on let him cull amazing insights
from few clues.
And with a powerful enough brain computer interface you and I will be able to do the
same.
Creating an indispensidle new architecture of information
Technology is still pretty far off from giving even us lowly pea brains that same power but
researchers are currently working on interfaces capable of reading brain waves and translating
that in to real world actions.
We dont know yet what things the tool of truly computational transactive memory will allow
us to create
but people then may look back on today and our pre-wired brains in much the same way
we see pre-literate people now.
"Dear God what must it be like in your funny little brains? It must be so boring."
But what do you think? Will brain computer interfaces advance to give us Sherlockian
powers of observation and deduction and what new architectures of information will be unleashed
by such an invention?
I'm going to be making an ask Emily video coming up soon so if you have any questions
about me or any of the topics I've covered in my videos ask me below, on tumblr, or @emilyeifler.
And as always the game is on so get curious.