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"I would say 75% of the economy is now being run by ex-science-fiction fans."
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| Automatic Reversed Memory | ||
| A device that activates memories and plays them back in reverse order. |
Timothy Sims had a problem; he had misplaced his wife's diamond engagement ring. He couldn't remember where he put it. If only there was a way for him to replay the experiences of the past few days...
| He was seated in Dr. Bergstrom's office with a sort of helmet on his head from which a thick cable of wire ran to an aggregation of electrical instruments on the table beside him. ..
 (Automatic reversed memory from 'Brain Control' by Dave Cummins) "That," sad the doctor, "was the preliminary trial. How did it go?" "Why" - Tim laughed - "pretty confusing, but I see now that I merely lived through the five minutes before I entered this office, in reverse order; everything happened backward. .." The doctor was pleased. "Evidently my process worked perfectly. I call it automatic reversed memory. By sending the proper electric currents through that helmet I reverse the electrical action of the nerve cells in the brain and produce this reversed memory... as real as actual experience." "That helmet I have devised has a great number of small metal plates inside which I pick up the impulses from the various parts of the brain. They pass through the wires to my instruments and their beats, frequencies, and potentials are recorded..." |
| Technovelgy from Brain Control,
by Dave Cummins. Published by Astounding Science-Fiction in 1937 Additional resources -
|
Once the impulses are recorded, they are played back into the brain so as to "exactly counteract and reverse the original impulses. This ... apparently reverses the directions of the chemical action of the dendrites and axones, and this results in a reversal of the ideas in the mind."
The use of electrodes to capture the electrical phenomena in the brain was first demonstrated in 1912 by Russian physiologist Vladimir Pravdich-Neminsky. By the mid-1930's, the field of clinical electroencephalography had opened up.
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Automatic Reversed Memory-related
news articles:
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| Bone-Building Drug Evenity Approved |
| BrainBridge Concept Transplant Of Human Head Proposed |
| Natural Gait With Prosthetic Connected To Nervous System |
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'I don't have to tell you about the seven two-mile-diameter orbital mirrors that circulate around the satellite, making it habitable.'
'The steel tortoise gave MacKinnon a feeling of Crusoe- like independence.'
'...then back to their work, though little enough it was on these automatic cultivators.'
't came out into plain view. Darkington glimpsed a slim body and six short legs of articulated dull metal.'
'The suit stands up and starts walking, gripping me round the calves and waist, taking the bulk of my weight off my throbbing feet.'
'Internally it’s made up of millions of components, but the most important ones are the thinking and memory parts of the Mind proper.'
'I could look down at that face of carefully molded synthetic rubber, tinted the exact shade of the doctor's living flesh.'
