One day technology may allow every chemical event in your brain to be recorded. The Soul Catcher by D. Trull Enigma Editor dtrull@parascope.com From the Files of Fortean Slips In Richard Linklatter's movie Slacker, there's this one guy with a compulsion for recording everything on videotape. His bedroom walls are lined with banks of televisions, there's a TV strapped on his back, and VCRs are rolling on every channel. He never leaves the house, terrified that something good might come on, and he'll miss it. There's probably a little bit of TV Boy in all of us. Obsessing about an occurrence is often more important the event itself, and making a copy for later takes precedence over what's happening right now. The Reverend Jesse Jackson once coined an eloquent term for it: the paralysis of analysis. And now researchers are announcing plans for TV Boy's ultimate wet dream: a computer chip implanted inside your head which will record your entire lifetime. An "artificial life team" at British Telecom recently discussed their hopes of arriving at such a technology within the next thirty years. The crew of scientists, led by Dr. Chris Winter, explain that the chip is to be implanted behind the eye at birth. There it will remain, capturing every datum of sensation that passes through the brain in the course of the subject's life. The researchers have named this sought-after chip "The Soul Catcher." First, let's consider the logistics of this. British Telecom estimates that in a lifespan of 80 years, the average brain processes 10 terabytes of data. They compare this to the exponential progress in computer storage technology. According to Dr. Ian Pearson, "official futurologist" at British Telecom, "If current trends in the miniaturization of computer memory continue at the rate of the past 20 years -- a factor of 100 every decade -- today's eight megabyte memory chips norm will be able to store 10 terabytes in 30 years." Maybe so. But this isn't ASCII text we're talking about storing here -- this is raw data from the most complex and least understood machine in the known universe: the human brain. Before we worry about getting a big enough hard drive to write this info on, we better figure out how the heck to read it. You know, I have the potential to build a bookshelf that could hold the complete original texts of all Russian literature, but they'd remain gobbledygook until I learned the language. Even assuming the Soul Catcher could someday be perfected, I get the feeling its makers have no idea what should be done with it. Dr. Winter proposes a few applications for the device with the reckless enthusiasm of a kid describing his new Wolverine action figure. "This is the end of death," Winter proclaimed. "By combining this information with a record of the person's genes, we could recreate a person physically, emotionally and spiritually." So now it's an immortality machine. But what kind of existence does the Soul Catcher provide once the body is dead? Is the deceased's consciousness preserved in isolation like a brain in a jar, or does experience continue via a new set of sensory apparatus? Winter gives a possible answer when he suggests, quite matter-of-factly, that a dead person's Soul Catcher could be transferred into the brain of a newborn child. And this is a GOOD thing? Has Winter stopped to think whether a baby ought to be reformatted like a blank floppy disk? Does "free will" sound familiar? Maybe he means that the recipient infant would be a clone of the original person, but we're still going to have to figure out whether clones have a right to live their own lives, too. Further prodding an already turbulent hornet's nest of ethical dilemma, Winter added that the Soul Catcher would be of great use to police. "An implanted chip would be like an aircraft's black box," he mused. Insert your own Big Brother reference here. It may be shortsighted to denounce a technological advance decades before it will have a chance to occur, but the Soul Catcher sounds pretty scary. May we all proceed with caution and good sense. And they've got to do something about that name: I can't help but mentally link it to the term "dog catcher." Personally, the last thing I want is a brain chip that rounds up stray thinkers and has them put to sleep. (c) Copyright 1996 ParaScope, Inc. Next: Hypodermic Skeeters Fortean Slips Index What do you think? Share your views in the message boards!