Relativity

Inception, a movie directed and written by Christopher Nolan, opened the public to a whole new world of lucid dreaming. Now we can find forums for lucid dreamers filled with communities of people trying to find the hidden meaning within their convoluted dreamscapes. Taking this concept even further is the idea of having shared lucid dreams. If having a lucid dream is tough enough, try having one at the same time and the same place with another person. Can that even be accomplished?

Scientists are looking into the realm of lucid dreaming for various reasons. Not only do they believe that the dreaming state is a way to better understand the waking mind, but they hope that lucid dreaming can be used to help Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, PTSD, or allow people who are plagued with nightmares find a restful night’s sleep. But that doesn’t explain how they manage to track lucid dreamers or how people lucid dream at all.

The difference between a lucid dream and a regular dream, is the activity of the lateral prefrontal cortex. In a regular dream, this part of the brain which controls logic and reasoning is asleep like the rest of the body, but during a lucid dream, this part of the brain is awake and functioning like it was awake despite the dreamer still remaining in unconscious REM sleep. Daniel Erlacher and his colleges at the University of Bern conducted a series of tests to see just how this lucid dreaming state differed from the normal waking state.

First, the volunteer would learn a series of eye movements used to alert the researchers that he or she was about to begin the requested task. The volunteer would then do the task and signal with that set of eye movements that the task was completed. The researchers discovered that cognitive tasks took the same time in a lucid dream as in real life, but that physical tasks took much longer.

The main problem is determining whether these lucid dreamers are actually asleep. Despite what their brain waves say, these lucid dreamers are indeed asleep. They feel no sensory information from the outside world despite many areas of their brain being wide awake. So, how can we do it?

With lucid dreaming, dream recall is increasingly important. Keeping a dream journal will help train the brain to remember dreams. Mnemonic Induction of Lucid Dreaming , or MILD, is waking up from a dream and trying to re-enter it while remembering that it was a dream. Additionally, reality checks, where you ask whether you are dreaming or not during the day can help you identify when you are dreaming. Of course coupling these techniques may increase the chances of lucid dreaming, sharing those dreams with someone else requires meticulous coordination. Nonetheless, it can be done; so happy dreaming and have fun experimenting with, or on, your friends.

In Ridley Scott’s 1982 sci-fi thriller Blade Runner the police possess hover vehicles. These vehicles, unlike those which would be created on Earth, are powered by a sort of jet engine. This transformation of car to plane is being looked into, however a hover car is quite different from a flying car.

The sought after hover car would not be powered by engines; they would be powered by magnets. According to the BBC, the main thrust for creating hover cars at all is the prospect of eradicating the combustion engine in cars. This is due to the fact that a magnet driven car is more reliable than an engine driven one. For the combustion engine, you need fuel; that’s not rocket science. But for the magnet driven car, the only things you would need is a magnet, something in the ground to repel the magnet, and a way to control when the car expressed its magnetic properties and hover.

In 2012, Volkswagen conducted something called the People’s Car Project in China and settled on three designs. One of them being an electrically powered hover car. The design was presented at the Beijing auto show in 2o12, but was quickly abandoned afterwards. This concept has recently resurfaced in the media as the concept of electricity powered hover cars have again caught the attention of the public.

Tel Aviv, Israel is currently testing a Californian-based technology developed by skyTran where streamlined vehicles are suspended from a Magnetic Levitation, or Maglev, track. The eighty million dollar Maglev track will be completed around the campus of Israel Aerospace Industries by the end of 2015, and extend to the rest of the city by 2016. This is no Blade Runner hover car, but the passengers will be able to order the tram from their smart phone and then enter their specific station of choice. Israel hopes that this technology will relieve the traffic flow by being operational twenty four hours a day while also being encouraged that the Maglev track can be built anywhere; even underground. This encouragement is bolstered by the fact that these Maglev cars are run using completely renewable resources. If this trial works in Tel Aviv, engineers hope to bring this technology to Toulouse, France; San Fransisco, California; and Kerala, India.

Although this technology isn’t a strict hover car, it will allow the average person to skip the daily commute in favor for a five dollar Maglev tram ride to work. In fact, skyTran hopes to expand the Maglev’s capacity from a two person car to a multi-person vehicle. We may very well see massive magnetic tram systems within cities not too far into the future.

The Matrix is an iconic movie trilogy based off of the idea of a technological uprising. The main plot is that computers, having had their main source of energy cut off from them, enslaved humans for the sake of self preservation. The whole idea of self preservation is fundamentally human; driven by a sense of self awareness. So, in order for this computer to refuse a human using this specific reason would mean that the computer would need to have a sense of self awareness akin to that of a human’s.

First, we need to understand what I mean by self awareness. Many robots nowadays are conscious meaning that they are aware of themselves and the environment; but they are not self aware, meaning that they are unable to recognize that they are conscious. We cross into HAL territory when the robots are able to recognize that they are “alive.” Scientists originally thought that humans were self aware due to their overly large cerebral cortex, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. A patient named patient R or Robert was studied by Iowa University due to the fact that a bout with a severe case of herpes left him with only a small portion of his cortex functioning. Despite this loss, he was still self aware. Even children with Hydranencephaly, where most of the cerebral cortex and other upper sections of the brain were replaced with sacs of cerebral spinal fluid, expressed self awareness in some cases. So, what causes self awareness? And do robots have the same capacity as humans in that respect?

Since the theory of the cerebral cortex was shattered by patient R, scientists are now left without a solid theory for the development of self awareness. It is understood that self awareness is spread over various parts of the brain; not contained in only one section. Unfortunately the interdisciplinary nature of this human phenomenon makes tracing its origin nothing more than speculation. That aside, even if self awareness could arise spontaneously, individual computers wouldn’t be able to handle it.

The brain is estimated to manage 225 million billion (225,000,000,000,000,000) interactions between its different components. On top of that, the brain’s thinking and reasoning are fluid and oftentimes illogical. A computer, which is ruled by linear if, then logic gates would be unable to possess software with the capability to process the infinite amount of possibilities that humans face on a day-to-day basis. More comparisons can be drawn between computers and humans which can be viewed here. In fact, recent advances in computer awareness technology are describing scenes with simple sentences. If that’s the current advancement in electronic self awareness, I doubt that we have to worry about AI insurrection anytime soon.

In the 1990’s original of Total Recall, Arnold Schwarzenegger plays a construction worker named Douglas Quaid who, after consistently dreaming about mars, decides to visit a place called Recall. As the name suggests, Recall sells fake memories that feel so real that the mind can’t distinguish between the real and implanted memories. After purchasing the Mars package, and choosing a few details like visiting as a secret agent and creating his dream woman, the employees of Recall begin the neural surgery only to find that he has already been fitted with a memory cap. This whole chain of events causes him to “remember” that he is a secret agent, except we-as the viewer-don’t know whether those memories are real or if he’s only playing out a fantasy implanted by Recall.

The hippocampus is a region of the brain most tied to long term memory and the emotions we experience when recalling that specific memory.

In 2013, spurred by major discoveries in 2012, a team at MIT published a paper called Creating a False Memory in the Hippocampus where they used optogenetics to breed mice with light sensitive neurons. They then shocked the mouse and, at a later time, used a laser to activate the photo-sensitive neurons where the memory was stored in the hippocampus. The mouse reacted to the light by taking a defensive posture which indicated that he was able to recall that fear memory under a completely different, unrelated circumstance. This revealed that memories are physical instead of abstract constructs.

Some are using the discovery that memory is physical and running with it. Also in 2013, Theodore Berger of the University of Southern California was able to externally connect a silicon chip to rat and monkey brains using electrodes. They used these chips not only to generate memories in the animals, but to recall memories created and stored at an earlier date as well.

If you haven’t realized by now, the brain records, relays, and recalls information using electrical signals. As such, the most challenging part about this whole endeavor, and what is ultimately stalling the progress of memory implants and recollection, is decoding the electrical impulses that the brain uses to control memory-or other specific processes in the brain. Eventually, they even hope to use this technology to enhance the brain’s ability to form new memories.

With all this new technology surrounding memory and the need to create, recall, and fake memories; the cure for Alzheimer’s or PTSD using memory implantation may not be that far into the future.