CogSciProfessor

If you look at science fiction movies like Total Recall (2012/1990) and Inception (2010), they offer a glimpse of the incredible technologies the future may someday bring. In Total Recall, an ordinary factory worker discovers that his current life is a fabrication based on false memories implanted into his brain by the government. In Inception, a professional thief commits corporate espionage by hijacking his targets’ subconscious while they’re asleep. Using these examples, can such technologies of implanting memories in someone else’s mind be, as you alluded to, future science?

A few years ago, Tonegawa and other researchers used a technique called optogenetics, to control neurons in mice that had been genetically sensitized to light. Using this technique, which involves shining a light to stimulate the neurons, they implanted a false memory in a mouse. In their experiment, mice were set up in a room where an electric foot shock took place, while a light was delivered via fiber-optic cable to their hippocampus (where memories are stored). The mice were conditioned to pair the shock with the room, facilitated by the optical stimulation to those neurons in that part of the brain. However, the mice exhibited the same fear, manifested by freezing behavior, when optically reactivated in an entirely different room where a foot shock was never delivered! It reactivated that memory of being shocked in that original room.

Rather than implanting false memories in the mouse brains, researchers like Theodore Berger looked in a different direction. Berger designed silicon chips to model the signal processing activity of the hippocampus, to essentially create an artificial implant. He found out how electrical signals from neurons move through the hippocampus to form long-term memories. Ultimately, this implant may help people who suffer from memory loss eventually to form long-term memories. Think Alzheimer's! It may even help supplement our own memories, which can be unreliable at times, as shown in studies done by Elizabeth Loftus and others on eyewitness testimony and victims of abuse.

If the science fiction of implanting memories someday turns into science fact, we’ll have these movies to thank for in encouraging discussions about the moral and social implications. And if we want to begin to imagine what a near future tomorrow might bring, we’ll have to start by using our own memory to recall the past and project ourselves into these possible futures.

It already has and will continue in the coming years, especially in the area of natural language processing (NLP). Think IBM's Watson! In fact, a big part of our thoughts is heavily tied to language (concepts, propositions, etc) so there's more reason for linguists and cognitive scientists alike to explore the intersections between the two.

Yes, memory is one my favorite aspects of the mind. Thanks for your question!

I share the same sentiments as you since I was trained as a neuroscientist (and now teaching cognitive science). Before I answer your question, I want to share with you a neat visualization that appeared in Wired magazine recently. It shows how fields like neuroscience is becoming more and more interdisciplinary over time with other fields (including psychology!). It may appear that neuroscience has been making more progress than the others within CogSci, but this does not mean that those fields are becoming less relevant or even, obsolete. Rather I would describe what you observed as a cycle. This cycle is mainly due to new technologies, new methodologies, and new ideas a field is making (e.g. cognitive linguistics was huge back in the 1960s and now neuroscience and AI). With that said, it's okay that these fields are answering the same questions; we want them to. As cognitive scientists we want to see how these fields converge on those questions based on their own levels of analysis and their own viewpoint. It's only going to help us better understand ourselves and how we operate as human beings.

For example, in regards to our brain's plasticity, there was a little girl who was born with very little cortical tissue. Doctors did not see much of a future for her because she did not have a ‘normal’ brain; however, because of cortical plasticity and the brain’s ability to reorganize itself, she learned to function quite well later on in life. This probably would not be true for someone who was much older...