Recording little bits of your brain

I have been worried that my entries here have become bitty. Each night just before I get to sleep, something occurs to me which I think should be blogged and I try to remember it. Of course, by next morning I have forgotten it all. I need some way of recording these thoughts. When I was younger and single, I used to write down key words for dreams as soon as I could after I woke up. I wrote these words in the dark and it was often a struggle to decipher the scrawl which resulted. I suppose I could do that now but ideally I would like something which is the reverse of the book to end all boredom. Part of that was the ability to detect brain state and feed it with the apporpriate stimulus to satisfy it at that moment. Obviously there is no such device around yet but I do remember some experiments which allowed the detection of the brain activity corresponding to input stimuli. It was only bars or checker-board patterns but the electrical activity was plainly visible. My brother once asked me to write a program to turn brain activity into graphics and sound to allow feedback loops. He said he was trying to get hold of an old EEG though I was skeptical that he would manage to get any output from it. I don't think he ever actually got hold of one but some years later I read an article in the Amateur Scientist section of Scientific American which detailed just such a device. Of course, you would only ever get a really blunt overview of a brain state but even within that range, you would probably be able to detect a mood given some reference data. How long will it be before you can think words onto a screen? How difficult would that be? Bearing in mind that even normal audible human speech is far removed from standard grammatical written communication, what would thoughts be like? I know you can use speech recognition programs and it is relatively easy to structure your speech so that this works but thoughts wander and I suspect that unless you were very disciplined, you would end up with something like Ulysses.

None of this helps me with my problem. I could boast, like Fermat, that I have something mind-blowing or just really interesting. Anyway, every idea I ever had is in this head somewhere. This writing is just fragments of it. Of course, there may be the odd football match which I have deleted and purged. Does the human brain ever get rid of anything? Recent theory states that only a tiny percentage of the experience we have is genuine input to our senses and that most of what we remember is actually interpolation by our brain, that in actual fact we are actually living very much inside our own heads. The everyday sensory input round us is actually a tiny part of or experience. We all have our own world. This links with the Quantum reality. Maybe we have to re-train our experience of a place if we have been absent from it for some time and each time we do this, our senses actually pick up a quite different view. This new view will then grate slightly with the latent memory of the place as defined before. I have run out of ideas here but one last related thing here. read The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and of course anything by Susan Greenfield.

I was going to talk about something specific here but something related directly to it has just happened which is enough to make me specifically NOT mention it. Will you never know what it is? Is there enough information here and in previous entries to allow a guess as to what it was going to be? I often think about how much evidence certain events leave behind. Are we not getting to the point where almost everything Newtonian can be re-constructed? Can, say, my presence in a room at a particular time (within a minute) be determined long after the event itself? How much of the world can be reconstructed? There was a companion book to the BBC program Tomorrow's World about 20 years ago which printed letters from people asking things of scientists. Amongst all the normal stuff such as accurate weather prediction and four-legged chickens, there was one which suggested that, as no energy is ever really destroyed, it should be possible to back-track from the current state and find out about peoples' conversations long ago. They were especially interested in what Henry V actually said before Agincourt. The accompanying cartoon answered the question with "Good Luck Lads - wish I was coming with you."

A link of the day for you :-

15 Answers to Creationist Nonsense

I am not sure about the use of the word "nonsense".