Remember, the heroes of the Resistance in Total Recall were loaded with fake life stories. As surprising as it may sound, today it is no longer just the field of science fiction. So can we completely trust our memory?
Cases of false memories have long been known in medicine. For them, a special word was invented - confabulation. Sometimes even large groups of people do not remember what happened. This is called the "Mundella effect". The legendary apartheid ballet puzzled many South Africans when he quietly died his bedside in 2013. A lot of people believed that he died in prison in the seventies, where he ended up for his revolutionary activities. In their picture of the world there was no place for 96-year-old Mandella, who ruled the country for 95 years and even received a Nobel Prize for it. Remember the cool old man with the monocle on the logo of the popular Monopoly game? Everyone remembers.
It turns out that the old man really was, but there was no monocle. Or the famous Queen song we are the champions.
Almost everyone is sure that the final sounds like champions of the world. But there really isn't any of the world. So people sometimes replace memories themselves for one reason or another. But I wonder if our memory can be corrected by someone else? The point is that memories of a particular event are not stored in the brain in any particular place. They are divided into many fragments and laid out in different parts of the cerebral cortex like files in a computer. A special part of the brain, the hippocampus, is working hard on this. For example, the smell of your favorite coffee, its taste and the appearance of the hippocampus is scattered in different folders. When one folder opens, all the others open. Thus, events are reconstructed into a coherent whole like a puzzle. In general, everything is quite complicated,therefore, they started talking about the real possibility of implanting memories only in 2011. A group of scientists led by Theodor Berger
from the University of Southern California managed to create a prosthesis of the middle part of the hippocampus. With it, they were able to record memories on digital media, and then re-load them into the brain. During the experiment, a tiny microchip with wires was implanted into the hippocampus of a mouse. The animals learned to get water by pressing two levers in a certain sequence. Scientists tracked which part of the hippocampus recorded information where the water was, and then recorded electrical impulses that were released by their brain during the learning process. Later, the mice were injected with a drug that turned off long-term memory. As a result, the mice forgot what they learned. But the scientists were able to bring the memories back - through a group of electrodes, they sent previously recorded impulses to the zone responsible for this particular memory. And the mice rememberedhow to get to the water. The result is a device that can turn memory off and on. Would be useful to such a scientist from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology under the leadership of Nobel laureate Suzumi Tonegawa.
They took a step further. In 2013, they managed to implant real false memories into the brain of a living being. This became possible thanks to the new technology of the genetics experience. It allows you to embed light-sensitive channels into the outer membrane of nerve cells. Through these channels, scientists then act on neurons with laser pulses. Another mouse had to suffer in the name of science. She was thrown into a room where she received an electric shock. Scientists were able to recognize the neurons responsible for remembering this, tagged them with a light-sensitive protein and recorded their signals. Later, the mouse was placed in another room, where no one shocked it, but by acting on the laser-marked pulses, the scientists activated the memory of the troubles in the mouse. As a result, scientists have recorded signs of fear in the behavior of the mouse. Although there was nothing to be afraid of. Scientists are now planning studies on other animals, including primates. And if they succeed, then soon we will be able to load into our brain a memory of what we have not been able to do or have never done. Just like Neo.
Of course, there is always a risk that someone will forcibly want to implant fake memories in us. Or maybe this is happening now? Perhaps we are really living in a computer simulation. There are those who believe that this is so. For example, world-famous inventor Elon Musk said at a conference in 2016: “Our reality is hardly basic. It is much more likely that the world around us and we ourselves are virtual entities created by a super-developed civilization of the level that we will probably reach 10,000 years later."
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