Can we
Download Mental Imagery?
Frankly, my goal is to contribute to the development of a process by which a person's visual imagination can be decoded and displayed physically on a computer screen. Whether this is possible in a few years, or decades, or impossible in our lifetimes, the utility of such a thing cannot be overstated. It might be used for:
Prosthesis for brain-damaged humans who have completely lost the potential to communicate by language (left-brain lesion patients, the severely retarded etc.)
Interspecies communication with higher primates. This would mirror the great ape sign language projects, in that (A) proof of another species' cognition makes protection of that species more effective, and (B) comparison with human visualization would throw more light on our own species.
High-bandwidth human/computer interfaces.
Recording crimes and atrocities exactly as witnesses experienced them, even when language is a barrier.
Higher-bandwidth communication between fully-capable human beings, accellerating their ability to educate, inform, and even entertain one another. This opens the possibility of increasing our collective intelligence and problem-solving speed. A mechanical metaphor would be in the way a Beowulf cluster's computing power is amplified by the speed and bandwidth of the connections between its nodes.
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 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License. | September 30 2005
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