Downloading Data Directly Into Your Brain?

A shout-out to reader Raywalt de  Cuba for suggesting this idea.
What if it were possible to connect your brain to the Internet, either wirelessly or through a cable, download digital information at high speed, and then translate it automatically into a chemical form that could be stored by your brain cells as memory?

Downloading directly into your brain would have enormous advantages over our present method of receiving information by reading physical representations of symbols with our eyes, a meatware  interface developed by the Sumerians about 10,000 years ago. If you could pump data directly into your gray matter at, say, 50 mbps — the top speed offered by one major U.S. internet service provider — you’d be able to read a 500-page book in just under two-tenths of a second. (Top that, Evelyn Wood.)
That means you could burn through the entire 29 million-book collection of the Library of Congress in less than two months, provided that you didn’t need to take time off to sleep. (See my earlier blog on wakefulness-promoting drugs and technologies for advice on how to do that.) You’d be vastly more knowledgeable than the brainiest intellectuals on the planet today, or even A.J. Jacobs, that guy who read all 44 million words of the Encyclopedia Britannica  so he could write a book about it.

As usual, there are a few potential downsides. If we were able to download the entire contents of libraries into our brains, it would become increasingly difficult to find a book that everybody hasn’t already read for next month’s book club get together. We might find ourselves spending countless hours posting snarky reviews on Amazon.com.

Kindle and the Espresso Book Machine would go the way of the eight-track tape player. Authors would become increasingly overworked as they struggled to keep up with the demand for new works of literature.
And that’s assuming that our brains could handle so much reading. Nobody is really sure how much information the 100 billion neurons in the human brain can actually store, though one neuroscientist has speculated that its maximum capacity may be as high as 100 terabytes, or the equivalent of about 100 million books. And as Chris Chatham’s Developing Intelligence blog points out, the human brain processes information quite differently than a computer.
The brain is an analog device, transmitting information at irregular speeds. And unlike a computer, which retrieves information by polling its memory address, Chatham notes, the brain has content-addressable memory, which means that information can be retrieved by activating related concepts — for example, the word “fox” might trigger thoughts of other small furry mammals, fox-hunting horseback riders or desirable members of the opposite sex. Additionally, unlike a computer, the brain alters the information it stores as it forges new connections. This explains why I can re-read John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath and be surprised to discover that the ending is different from what I seem to remember reading in high-school English class, because over time I had mixed it up with the movie version. Would our neural version of Google be able to process such a vast library of information efficiently? Or would it break down and become hopelessly paralyzed by data smog? Hard to say.

I’m not sure who first thought of the idea of downloading data directly into the human brain. In 1981, cyberpunk writer William Gibson published a short story, “Johnny Mnemonic,” in which the lead character has the equivalent of a hard drive implanted in his head, so that he can store and transport sensitive data for corporate clients. Gibson’s story was the basis for a 1995 movie starring Keanu Reeves. The same actor subsequently appeared in another Gibson-influenced 1999 thriller, The Matrix, in which the network port on the back of his character’s head is used to pump him full of martial-arts expertise and other knowledge.

In the real world, back in 2000 Michael Saylor, founder of the business intelligence firm MicroStrategy, proposed  someday transmitting the latest information directly into subscribers’ brains. In a Washingtonian magazine story on Saylor, he elaborated on his notion:

Saylor wants to beam information directly into your mind, maybe through transmitters sunk into your skull or an implant behind your eye or a tiny speaker in your ear so he can reach you sleeping or eating or drinking or playing or flying or making love. The network he envisions would tell you about traffic jams or medicine you need to take or a stock you should sell or a book you'd like to read or whether your daughter broke her arm or a neighbor just drove through your basement.
"Our mantra is intelligent e-business, which means personalized, proactive Web, wireless, and voice intelligence, and so this idea that you shouldn't just use the Web site but rather the Web site should bark out to you," he says. "That was a totally new idea."
Translation: Your cell phone or transmitter would alert you with information it thinks you might need, sort of like an omniscient butler in your brain.
MicroStrategy would run this network and make billions in the process, which is Mike Saylor's job but not his goal. It's not why he was put on Earth. Saylor believes he was put here to change the world, to obliterate ignorance, to spread "intelligence everywhere."

More recently, a prominent British educator, Independent Schools Council chief Chris Parry, last year blithely predicted that within 30 years, students would be downloading lessons directly into their brains.  Earlier this year, an organization called the Innerspace Foundation offered a prize for the first device that bypasses the need for traditional learning of information.

So far, scientists seem to have had more success transmitting transmit information in the other direction, with brain machine interfaces that translate human brain-wave activity into digital form, so that people can operate machines with their thoughts.  But they’re also exploring ways to use the same interfaces to put information into the brain. Electronics giant Sony, for example, reportedly has patented a device for transmitting sensory data — ranging from moving images to tastes and sounds — into the brain by firing pulses of ultrasound. (One big advantage of this method would be that you wouldn’t have to have a surgical implant or a cable plugged into the back of your skull.)

So what do you think? Should we develop a way of pumping our brains full of information? Or should we resist the temptation to become know-it-alls? Express your opinion below.