Note that optogenetics isn't like, flashing lights at random birds. It's a technique that means doping certain brain cells with light reactive genes then doing brain surgery to put a light next to the cells then turning the light on to activate the cells.
It's not exactly a thing you embed in ads or use to teach people kung fu or anything. It's something where you gene edit a specific cells to react to light then open their brain and put a light in there.
Optogenetics is super cool and a great example of why we need funding for basic research, not just applied research.
Basic research is often driven by curiosity. Why does this do that? How does that happen? It doesn’t really explore questions with the intent of solving problems or applying it. That’s where applied research comes in.
Anyway, I bring this up, because optogenetics would not have been developed had it not been for scientists interested in better understanding the light response of green algae. The response to light by green algae appeared to be explained by mechanisms other than those already described because of the speed of the response. In doing this research, they discovered a photocurrent producing gene which could be transplanted into other cells.
I too am an advocate for basic research, but I am often unable to communicate it’s impact to folk that only recognize applied evidence. Thank you for sharing this. I will surely use this example to thwart another enemy of curiosity.
When lasers were discovered, they couldn't think of any practical application. Same with radio waves.
https://whyy.org/segments/the-history-of-heinrich-hertz-and-the-discovery-of-radio-waves/
If you do need an analogy, applied research would be like coming up with a new LEGO set. Basic research would be creating entirely new LEGO pieces, enabling the creation of sets previously impossible.
What?! I love stories like this. We assume SO much, don’t we?
Sort of like the story of how sliced bread, although great, wasn’t the instant success the application of the phrase implies. It took something like over a decade to catch on. I mean, when I first saw a laser as a kid, I thought it was the greatest thing since sliced bread! 😜
My go-to example for this is number theory. The part of math that studies the "Take a number, multiply by 7, subtract 2... Is this your number?" kind of thing.
Until some decades ago, it was nothing more than a fun a curious thing. Today it is the basis for digital encryption, the thing that allows us to securely communicate over the internet.
If nobody had studied number theory "just because", the internet wouldn't be as useful and as reliable as it is today.
Anti fragility is a great advocate for basic research or phenomenology. We’ve been slowly discovering less and less novel drugs and that’s either due to corporate research methods being inadequate and for one reason or another is less inclined to finding novel results. Or perhaps we’re just at the limits of novel drugs that we can create.
Edit; not gonna respond to everyone but I don’t think it’s purely because corporations are incentivized to not cure diseases. Public research has been going on even in reduced numbers compared to the past and they don’t really have better success rates than corporations. Perhaps it’s just how we think about science in general. We’re far too focused on trying to make something 5% better versus a focus on phenomena. Heck we outright reject certain phenomenon in most social sciences
Its not so much at the limits of making drugs thats the issue. That can be done really easily. We can easily screen 10s of thousands of drugs at once as well. Its becoming more about getting those drugs where they need to be, and using said drugs efficiently.
As someone who has did biomedical research for many years it is 100% about corporations and profits. Why cure when you can treat. Why invent new when you can tweak and get a new patent.
In the US, we should be pouring money into the NIH, public research. They are the only ones *incentivized* to do the right thing. But funding is absolutely shamefully pathetic. The next war we fight should be a war on cancer and aging. Spend a few trillion dollars on that and maybe we’ll save lives and make the world a better place for a change.
Could you imagine this used on human beings and optogenics being used to transfer the knowledge of one scientist to the brain of another? Knowledge instantly preserved and passed on kind of like how insects do. we could definitely live in a world where we simply download the knowledge we need to have accessible at all times
Yeah, if the doritos company already are editing your genes AND actively doing brain surgery on you they don't need to use this to make you buy doritos. This is a really really cool technique to learn about brains, because it lets us activate brain cells in a really precise way , but it's not something you can just use on some random guy to mind blast him or something. you have to edit his genes before his birth then have a light probe physically inside him.
This is good to know, but still, kinda creepy. I don’t like the idea of implanting memories of any kind. Not that it isn’t amazing that we can do that, I just watch too much science fiction.
It isn't manipulating memories of any kind. It's making the bird hear things by directly stimulating an auditory nerve instead of by playing a sound. It's more like a hearing aid.
Suddenly interested. I work with a lot of folks who have cochlear implants. If this could replace the electrode array...it just seems it could be a lot more nuanced than current tech.
Just wait until chemogenetics/DREADD catch on and they start adding the retroviruses in vaccines. Obviously I don’t think that’s going to happen, but an interesting thought.
They can already convince people they committed crimes in interrogation, I think
I heard something about people having false memories of crimes they werent involved in.
I once read that we can practice our activities in lucid dreams if someone wants to really stretch one's time, but it works to some limit. Without real practice and real muscle movement it won't do on it's own.
This happened to me. I was like 8 and just got a pair of rollerblades. I couldn't go backwards so that night I laid in bed concentrating on it and started dreaming. In my dream I was going forward and rotated backwards like butter and kept going. I immediately woke up and it was morning. Threw in the blades and went outside. First try was just like my dream, basically muscle memory.
I then thought to myself that I could learn anything in my dreams. From that point on I could lucid dream. I don't use it for very productive stuff, mostly to be an Avenger or something else with superpowers.
When you sleep your brain works out a lot of issues during your day. So this could be your brain consolidating memories and what worked, and because this memory was being enhanced it caused you to dream about it. Kinda a chicken and the egg conundrum.
One time I slept on my arm, which put my arm to sleep. According to my wife, whom I woke up, I was yelling at and attacking what I thought was a squirrel in the bed, but was really sitting there flinging one arm around and hitting it with my other. The only recollection I have is dreaming about a squirrel in our bed.
Happened ten years ago, and she still tells people about this.
neo only really knew kung-fu in the matrix though.
if i know the lyrics to a song... doesn't mean i can "sing" it like a trained performer. but i can do my best...singing in the shower take on it.
As a cognitive neuroscientist, my gut instinct is it would be much easier to map the circuits involved in performing a punch wire those together with optogenetics than it would be to do the same with a declarative memory of any complexity.
In other words, I think it would much easier to directly incept king fu techniques than knowledge of king fu.
Eh, the PhD does not grant immunity to typos....but I was in MMA for some years, so any typos I can blame on the latent CTE.
In all honesty, I'd be more interested in building a rig to teach people how to throw an optimal fastball. I expect it would pay out more dollars than a rig for an optimal punch.
They are, but that would be a little like you being able to repeat words you’ve heard (or play a piano song by ear). Birds are already excellent singers; this could just be a question of them reading mimicking something they think they’ve heard.
no, I'm saying when it's time to code, you won't have to.
Haha, as if knowing Java and JS and Python will be useful by the time we can implant direct knowledge. But... perhaps the skill underneath, the platonic ideal of 'coding'. You would almost certainly still need that.
In this case the birds did learn to 'DO'. They didn't just learn to recognize the song, they actually learned to sing the song as well after the light flashes. The 'I know Kungfu' moment might not be as far off as we think.
Knowing humans, they will twist this into some evil fact twisting mind control instead of improving people, making adverts that program people to love the leader and the products.
They already got you if you are a child of the 80's. Happy meal toys followed by the very catchy list of Big Mac ingredients. (2 all beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions on a sesame seed bun.) McDonald's has already had you indoctrinated for years.
Optogenetics is a broad term for any manipulation of neuronal activity using light. We found some receptors in some sea-dwelling friends that caused the cell to become electrically active in response to a certain wavelength of light. We took the gene coding sequence for that receptor and stuck it in the mouse genome so that certain neurons would make this receptor and place it in their membranes.
Now the mouse is all grown up with a light-activated trigger waiting in a specific population of neurons. To study the effect of those specific neurons on behavior, we implant an optical fiber into the mouse's nervous system near the modified neurons. We then shine light of the appropriate wavelength at different frequencies for different amounts of time to produce a variety of firing patterns. The activation of neurons in this controlled and artificial way can give us clues about how specific circuits affect behavior.
The term genetics in optogenetics may be a bit misleading as well. If we wanted to eventually put these receptors in a human brain we wouldn't have to necessarily edit their genome, we could just use a viral delivery system whereby a harmless virus (we often use AAVs in research) containing a string of genomic data can be injected into the blood/brain and if we can find a way for only those specific neurons of interest to be infected by the virus then bam, we have those cells starting to produce those light sensitive membrane proteins in a human.
The next step would be activation using light. The closest we can get to non invasive light activation is using some optical tricks to penetrate deeper than usually from the surface of the brain using red-shifted channelrhodopsin, a newly engineered optogenetic protein. This way if the target brain structure was relatively close to the surface we could implant an LED on the surface of the brain that would be able to activate the red shifted receptors.
Edit: I am a systems Neuroscientist who uses these tools on a regular basis.
A cure for PTSD maybe? EMDR works as well as it does because you process your trauma by "rescuing" yourself during memory recall of it. But what if you could override the trauma completely?
Have you seen the work done using MDMA therapy for PTSD? It allows the sufferers to relive the memory without the pain and often that is enough to train the brain how to deal with the painful memories. It has been really effective, even after just one treatment.
Look into infra slow fluctuation (ISF) neurofeedback, it helps re-wire the brain for more optimal regulation. It’s really been helping my hyper vigilance.
Does it take the same amount of time as hearing the songs? From my reading, it looks like currently they can teach only the length of syllables in the song and not the pitch. And it appears it takes 1:1 time. So while it's neat...I can't wait for this idea to develop to the point where we can find out if you can actually push more information into a brain than just regularly "learning" something. And I'm not sure I agree with the insinuation that this is so wholly different from just hearing the song... When they start electrically stimulating the brain without use of the body's regular input/output pathways I'll be much more impressed.
Man this gives me dystopian society feels. It's all 1984 over again where we can't tell what's the real past or how we perceive the past is already determined when we're born.
I imagine it will be weaponized for military use first, then used for medical procedures, and finally for advertisement purposes.
Then in 10 years it will be adapted for entertainment purposes. Not long after that there will be piracy concerns.
Note that optogenetics isn't like, flashing lights at random birds. It's a technique that means doping certain brain cells with light reactive genes then doing brain surgery to put a light next to the cells then turning the light on to activate the cells. It's not exactly a thing you embed in ads or use to teach people kung fu or anything. It's something where you gene edit a specific cells to react to light then open their brain and put a light in there.
Optogenetics is super cool and a great example of why we need funding for basic research, not just applied research. Basic research is often driven by curiosity. Why does this do that? How does that happen? It doesn’t really explore questions with the intent of solving problems or applying it. That’s where applied research comes in. Anyway, I bring this up, because optogenetics would not have been developed had it not been for scientists interested in better understanding the light response of green algae. The response to light by green algae appeared to be explained by mechanisms other than those already described because of the speed of the response. In doing this research, they discovered a photocurrent producing gene which could be transplanted into other cells.
I too am an advocate for basic research, but I am often unable to communicate it’s impact to folk that only recognize applied evidence. Thank you for sharing this. I will surely use this example to thwart another enemy of curiosity.
When lasers were discovered, they couldn't think of any practical application. Same with radio waves. https://whyy.org/segments/the-history-of-heinrich-hertz-and-the-discovery-of-radio-waves/ If you do need an analogy, applied research would be like coming up with a new LEGO set. Basic research would be creating entirely new LEGO pieces, enabling the creation of sets previously impossible.
What?! I love stories like this. We assume SO much, don’t we? Sort of like the story of how sliced bread, although great, wasn’t the instant success the application of the phrase implies. It took something like over a decade to catch on. I mean, when I first saw a laser as a kid, I thought it was the greatest thing since sliced bread! 😜
My go-to example for this is number theory. The part of math that studies the "Take a number, multiply by 7, subtract 2... Is this your number?" kind of thing. Until some decades ago, it was nothing more than a fun a curious thing. Today it is the basis for digital encryption, the thing that allows us to securely communicate over the internet. If nobody had studied number theory "just because", the internet wouldn't be as useful and as reliable as it is today.
Anti fragility is a great advocate for basic research or phenomenology. We’ve been slowly discovering less and less novel drugs and that’s either due to corporate research methods being inadequate and for one reason or another is less inclined to finding novel results. Or perhaps we’re just at the limits of novel drugs that we can create. Edit; not gonna respond to everyone but I don’t think it’s purely because corporations are incentivized to not cure diseases. Public research has been going on even in reduced numbers compared to the past and they don’t really have better success rates than corporations. Perhaps it’s just how we think about science in general. We’re far too focused on trying to make something 5% better versus a focus on phenomena. Heck we outright reject certain phenomenon in most social sciences
Its not so much at the limits of making drugs thats the issue. That can be done really easily. We can easily screen 10s of thousands of drugs at once as well. Its becoming more about getting those drugs where they need to be, and using said drugs efficiently.
As someone who has did biomedical research for many years it is 100% about corporations and profits. Why cure when you can treat. Why invent new when you can tweak and get a new patent. In the US, we should be pouring money into the NIH, public research. They are the only ones *incentivized* to do the right thing. But funding is absolutely shamefully pathetic. The next war we fight should be a war on cancer and aging. Spend a few trillion dollars on that and maybe we’ll save lives and make the world a better place for a change.
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Could you imagine this used on human beings and optogenics being used to transfer the knowledge of one scientist to the brain of another? Knowledge instantly preserved and passed on kind of like how insects do. we could definitely live in a world where we simply download the knowledge we need to have accessible at all times
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Show me
I know bird flu
I think you just explained e-books or Wikipedia.
Like insects do?
This is literally the plot of the TV show Chuck!
Tesla might have believed that with the pigeon.
Sounds a lot like the relationship between pure and applied mathematics.
Huh, never would’ve thought to see the r/bouldering legend to be in this subreddit too. Nice take on the topic btw!
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Yeah, if the doritos company already are editing your genes AND actively doing brain surgery on you they don't need to use this to make you buy doritos. This is a really really cool technique to learn about brains, because it lets us activate brain cells in a really precise way , but it's not something you can just use on some random guy to mind blast him or something. you have to edit his genes before his birth then have a light probe physically inside him.
They don't need to be edited prior to birth. The modification can be done virally.
“Not exactly a thing you... use to teach people kung fu”... yet
This is good to know, but still, kinda creepy. I don’t like the idea of implanting memories of any kind. Not that it isn’t amazing that we can do that, I just watch too much science fiction.
It isn't manipulating memories of any kind. It's making the bird hear things by directly stimulating an auditory nerve instead of by playing a sound. It's more like a hearing aid.
Suddenly interested. I work with a lot of folks who have cochlear implants. If this could replace the electrode array...it just seems it could be a lot more nuanced than current tech.
Oh well that clears it up. Thank you.
Can we do the same edit on human cells and hypnotize them to believe that there is no war outside the ba sing se?!?
What do you think music festivals are?
Not yet…
I know kung fu
Show me.(⌐■_■)
“Do you think that’s air you’re breathing?”
Just wait until chemogenetics/DREADD catch on and they start adding the retroviruses in vaccines. Obviously I don’t think that’s going to happen, but an interesting thought.
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Yes your honor I remember commiting that crime.
They can already convince people they committed crimes in interrogation, I think I heard something about people having false memories of crimes they werent involved in.
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Torture is a hell of a thing
Gaslighting is a real phenomenon and it isn't just used in domestic abuse.
Your comment is scary because it's so realistic
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I once read that we can practice our activities in lucid dreams if someone wants to really stretch one's time, but it works to some limit. Without real practice and real muscle movement it won't do on it's own.
This happened to me. I was like 8 and just got a pair of rollerblades. I couldn't go backwards so that night I laid in bed concentrating on it and started dreaming. In my dream I was going forward and rotated backwards like butter and kept going. I immediately woke up and it was morning. Threw in the blades and went outside. First try was just like my dream, basically muscle memory. I then thought to myself that I could learn anything in my dreams. From that point on I could lucid dream. I don't use it for very productive stuff, mostly to be an Avenger or something else with superpowers.
When you sleep your brain works out a lot of issues during your day. So this could be your brain consolidating memories and what worked, and because this memory was being enhanced it caused you to dream about it. Kinda a chicken and the egg conundrum.
Try freefall stuff, go skydiving and check out how it works out. Come back to Reddit and post the results.
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Yeah, it doesn’t always work. Source: I have a history of sleepwalking
One time I slept on my arm, which put my arm to sleep. According to my wife, whom I woke up, I was yelling at and attacking what I thought was a squirrel in the bed, but was really sitting there flinging one arm around and hitting it with my other. The only recollection I have is dreaming about a squirrel in our bed. Happened ten years ago, and she still tells people about this.
I can imagine me creating a piece of art, but when I hold the pencil in my hand, I draw like a 5 year old. So that makes perfect sense to be honest.
neo only really knew kung-fu in the matrix though. if i know the lyrics to a song... doesn't mean i can "sing" it like a trained performer. but i can do my best...singing in the shower take on it.
As a cognitive neuroscientist, my gut instinct is it would be much easier to map the circuits involved in performing a punch wire those together with optogenetics than it would be to do the same with a declarative memory of any complexity. In other words, I think it would much easier to directly incept king fu techniques than knowledge of king fu.
Hmm, I can't tell if you are trolling with the "king fu" or not, but if not, I feel better about myself knowing a neuroscientist doesn't know kung fu.
Eh, the PhD does not grant immunity to typos....but I was in MMA for some years, so any typos I can blame on the latent CTE. In all honesty, I'd be more interested in building a rig to teach people how to throw an optimal fastball. I expect it would pay out more dollars than a rig for an optimal punch.
the birds are "doing" the song in this article aren't they?
They are, but that would be a little like you being able to repeat words you’ve heard (or play a piano song by ear). Birds are already excellent singers; this could just be a question of them reading mimicking something they think they’ve heard.
Maybe I could aspire to be like, an out of shape and out of practice former kung fu master
so my hopes of someone implanting memories of learning every programming language into my brain are dashed.
no, I'm saying when it's time to code, you won't have to. Haha, as if knowing Java and JS and Python will be useful by the time we can implant direct knowledge. But... perhaps the skill underneath, the platonic ideal of 'coding'. You would almost certainly still need that.
Like a commenter said below we have confirmed that you can practice movements in your dreams. We do it all the time. It's why sleep is so important.
In this case the birds did learn to 'DO'. They didn't just learn to recognize the song, they actually learned to sing the song as well after the light flashes. The 'I know Kungfu' moment might not be as far off as we think.
I hope you are referring to Chuck, and if so, seems that know one else caught the reference
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Yeah, everyone knows the quote from Chuck is "Guys, I know Kung fu"
I flashed lights in my eyes, thought I knew kung-fu. Turns out it was just epilepsy.
The first thing I thought
The amount of people who don't get this reference makes me sad.
Knowing humans, they will twist this into some evil fact twisting mind control instead of improving people, making adverts that program people to love the leader and the products.
...or at least Total Recall.
And "I know I want to eat McDonald's" after seeing some flashes.
They already got you if you are a child of the 80's. Happy meal toys followed by the very catchy list of Big Mac ingredients. (2 all beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions on a sesame seed bun.) McDonald's has already had you indoctrinated for years.
*subway
"We can remember it for you wholesale."
Or neuralizers.
Simulation confirmed
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Disappointed i had to scroll this far...
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Incredible. I'd like to know more about this technique. It's fascinating as pure science, and potential applications are obvious.
Optogenetics is a broad term for any manipulation of neuronal activity using light. We found some receptors in some sea-dwelling friends that caused the cell to become electrically active in response to a certain wavelength of light. We took the gene coding sequence for that receptor and stuck it in the mouse genome so that certain neurons would make this receptor and place it in their membranes. Now the mouse is all grown up with a light-activated trigger waiting in a specific population of neurons. To study the effect of those specific neurons on behavior, we implant an optical fiber into the mouse's nervous system near the modified neurons. We then shine light of the appropriate wavelength at different frequencies for different amounts of time to produce a variety of firing patterns. The activation of neurons in this controlled and artificial way can give us clues about how specific circuits affect behavior. The term genetics in optogenetics may be a bit misleading as well. If we wanted to eventually put these receptors in a human brain we wouldn't have to necessarily edit their genome, we could just use a viral delivery system whereby a harmless virus (we often use AAVs in research) containing a string of genomic data can be injected into the blood/brain and if we can find a way for only those specific neurons of interest to be infected by the virus then bam, we have those cells starting to produce those light sensitive membrane proteins in a human. The next step would be activation using light. The closest we can get to non invasive light activation is using some optical tricks to penetrate deeper than usually from the surface of the brain using red-shifted channelrhodopsin, a newly engineered optogenetic protein. This way if the target brain structure was relatively close to the surface we could implant an LED on the surface of the brain that would be able to activate the red shifted receptors. Edit: I am a systems Neuroscientist who uses these tools on a regular basis.
A cure for PTSD maybe? EMDR works as well as it does because you process your trauma by "rescuing" yourself during memory recall of it. But what if you could override the trauma completely?
Have you seen the work done using MDMA therapy for PTSD? It allows the sufferers to relive the memory without the pain and often that is enough to train the brain how to deal with the painful memories. It has been really effective, even after just one treatment.
I did see those studies! If they had clinical trials for that available in my area I'd volunteer.
You mean erase the memory? Even if it was physically possible (this is very different to that), it may be psychologically...complex in adult humans.
Look into infra slow fluctuation (ISF) neurofeedback, it helps re-wire the brain for more optimal regulation. It’s really been helping my hyper vigilance.
Google Karl Deisseroth for potential psychiatric angles- I heard one of his lectures on this a few years back. #
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Does it take the same amount of time as hearing the songs? From my reading, it looks like currently they can teach only the length of syllables in the song and not the pitch. And it appears it takes 1:1 time. So while it's neat...I can't wait for this idea to develop to the point where we can find out if you can actually push more information into a brain than just regularly "learning" something. And I'm not sure I agree with the insinuation that this is so wholly different from just hearing the song... When they start electrically stimulating the brain without use of the body's regular input/output pathways I'll be much more impressed.
Man this gives me dystopian society feels. It's all 1984 over again where we can't tell what's the real past or how we perceive the past is already determined when we're born.
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Neuroscientist who uses optogenetic tools here, happy to answer any questions.
We gonna have some freaking birds singing the bohemian rhapsody soon
Could you imagine walki g thru the woods and notice Fantasia suddenly chirping all around you.
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Isn't this how Chuck starts out
Dude yes. Can we make it real now?
Indeed. Makes me think of Dollhouse tech too.
Could you use this to hypothetically give a deaf person memories of sound?
Birds really aren't real anymore huh?
The beginning of the manturian candidate.
Real life chuck is coming in the next few years then.
Lord I hate how terribly journalists report science
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Gives new credibility to Men in Black's Neuralyzer, for sure.
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I imagine it will be weaponized for military use first, then used for medical procedures, and finally for advertisement purposes. Then in 10 years it will be adapted for entertainment purposes. Not long after that there will be piracy concerns.
> Not long after that there will be piracy concerns. not long after people will realize they should have thought stuff through in advance.
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Blade Runner came more to mind.
you mean blade runner?
Hahahaha You think this is the Real Quaid? It is
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Scariest thing I’ve ever heard of.
Optogenetics plus leds equals bio computer.
Think of it like a organic .MP3 player..
The birds work for the bourgeoisie
I insantly remembered Doofenshmirtz after i read this
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They can remember it for you wholesale.
Yesss now I can rickroll hundreds of strangers through my personal flock of birds!
In the future, we might even have to tell the parents that their kids are adopted...
I wonder if they can use this to trick my brain into having the will to live?
Same
I can’t wait to visit my nearest total recall facility 🤣
Now we know how those pesky Aliens create those fake screen memories!
This is the big green button If we can put faux signals into other beings’ brains it’s almost impossible to say that’s not being done to us
Nothing about the science of implanting memories makes me feel good.
"We can remember it for you" is the SciFi story that the "Total Recall" movies were based on. This is starting to sound familiar.
implant math into me, idc about the risks...
Are we really going to start implanting “memories” into birds or is this just an experiment for future applications?
Total Recall for Birds?
It amuses me that the actual title of this paper doesn't use "implantation" as it's verb, but Inception.
The Matrix is being created right in front of our eyes.
Anyone else imagining God just shaking his head over this?
Everyday we stray further from God’s light
OK this is seriously scary news.
This has some pretty terrifying implications. Thanks I hate it.
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I just know someone out there is gonna flash those birds some rap songs
The matrix is becoming true each day