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To make it easier to diagnose and study sleep problems, researchers at MIT and Massachusetts General Hospital have devised a new way to monitor sleep stages without sensors attached to the body. Their device uses an advanced artificial intelligence algorithm to analyze the radio signals around the person and translate those measurements into sleep stages: light, deep, or rapid eye movement (REM).
“Imagine if your Wi-Fi router knows when you are dreaming, and can monitor whether you are having enough deep sleep, which is necessary for memory consolidation,” says Dina Katabi, the Andrew and Erna Viterbi Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, who led the study. “Our vision is developing health sensors that will disappear into the background and capture physiological signals and important health metrics, without asking the user to change her behavior in any way.”
Why don't you remember those compartments until you dream in them again? If you had lived a different life, who would you be? What if, electro-biochemically, you could make certain someone HAS compartmentalized memories, but won't recall them upon awakening? We rarely retain our dreams anyway, right?
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I am a huge fan of science fiction. Playing the What-If Game is always a fun mental exercise with clever people...
What if we didn't have to wait for wireless brain-to-brain communication? For audible and visual brain-to-digital-and-back-to-brain communication?
What if it was an already maturing technology of some twenty years, but currently rested only in the hands of the NSA, CIA, FBI, NGA, IRS, and BLM types? (three letter acronyms only please) :-)
While Huxley and Orwell remain loads of fun on long rainy Saturday afternoons, lets face it, those gentlemen never were quite up-to-speed with what was coming in the Information Age.
What if a disproportionate number of ultra-conservative, secret squirrel, "My name is Smith...Joseph Smith" religious types had been tapping thousands of unwitting brains for years? Simply because of their disproportionate numbers in the organizations above. Tilting the technology in their favor since the 1980's.
What if the NSA had a deeper understanding of the nature of electro-bio-neurology than we had thought possible. Kept well compartmentalized and hidden within the bureaucracy of course. Would it have been for the better that such a thing had been kept secret? Would their hands not have been the best hands in which to entrust such technology?
Feel free to ignore the philosophical challenge. I think most of you have realized by now that I don't put these topics up on the board so that people will comment on them in droves. -eab