The Soul Catcher

Catching up with the Soul Catcher

Imagine a microchip implanted behind your eyes, able to record everything you see, anything you hear, all the sensations you feel. Imagine your whole life captured as electronic data for anybody to watch...

‘This is not like TV only better. This is life, a piece of somebody’s life straight from the cerebral cortex... I mean, you’re there, you’re seeing it, you’re doing it.’

Scary, isn’t it, just how fast science fiction turns into potential fact?

That’s a quote from Lenny in Strange Days (a seriously under-rated film). And yet the basic technology’s already being developed. At Stanford University in the US a team is working on a way to cut and rejoin nerves, to form electrical links between on-chip microelectronics and axons of the brain. After the nerves regenerate, neural signals can (and have been) recorded.

But it was Dr Chris Winter from British Telecom’s Martlesham Heath Laboratories, near Ipswich who really upped the ante and sent science watchers into a spin last year, when he mentioned BT’s ideas for the ‘Soul Catcher’. A micro-memory chip, designed to be implanted into the human brain to record life as it happens.

‘This is the end of death... By combining this information with a record of the person’s genes, we could recreate a person physically, emotionally and spiritually,’ announced Dr Winter. ‘All we think, all our emotions and creative brain activity will be able to be copied onto silicon. This is immortality in the truest sense - future generations will not die.’

Except that, as Chris Winter now stresses, ‘the Soul Catcher was a concept, an extrapolation of technology...’ Although that doesn’t mean it won’t happen! In fact, Chris Winter’s view is still that ‘sensory information capture’ is perfectly plausible.

And given the amount of work quietly being done in the US, Japan and the UK on human/machine interfaces it’s hard not to think the scientists have just decided to keep the lid on it all, rather than face the feeding-frenzy of the press everytime they surface with a little snip of information!

The idea behind the Soul Catcher is that chips would collect sensory data for later use. So an optic memory chip behind the eye would be linked to other ‘in-brain’ chips until our five senses were captured.

‘As proposed,’ says Chris Winter, ‘the chip could store the equivalent of video, sound, smell and touch files for you to replay.’

Think of it as making a back-up copy of your life...

Why would anyone want a back-up copy of every mistake, blunder and hangover they’ve ever had? Because, it would then be possible to give a new-born child a lifetime’s experience by giving it the Soul Catcher from a dead adult.

Pretty useful, if you’re wondering what to do with that clone you’ve been saving up for. And it sure as hell beats paying some West Coast cryonics company around $28,000 to freeze your head, plus annual storage costs of $200 or so.

(Always remembering that cryobiologist Arthur Rowe’s dictum that believing cryonics can reanimate somebody who’s been frozen is like believing you can turn a hamburger back into a cow!)

But if immortality isn’t your thing, then how about being someone else for half an hour instead? Because, according to BT’s ‘artificial life team’, within 30 years we could be able to relive other people’s lives by accessing their ‘soul catcher’ chips and downloading their experiences to a computer, to a TV or maybe even direct to a VR set. And that’s where the real commercial interest will lie...

What price film and satellite TV when real life is on offer? Just imagine the bidding wars if instead of just talking about it, media junkies like Princess Di actually offered to let you inside the action.

It might sound impossible, but don’t forget that it’s not just Stamford who are working on direct neural interfaces, Japanese scientists are also busy growing actual neurons on the surface of addressable chips... And BT have already measured the flow of impulses from the optic nerve, as well as impulses produced by smell, taste, touch and hearing. And the maths stacks up, according to the calculations done by Peter Cochrane, head of research at BT Laboratories.

In the course of an eighty-year life the human brain processes roughly 10 terrabite of memory, equivalent to 300 million books or 7,142,857,142,860,000 floppy discs!

Which ten years ago would have been impossible to even realistically contemplate storing as data. But it seems there’s a basic law of miniaturization on Martlesham Heath side which states that the amount of computer memory a chip can hold is increasing by a factor 100 every decade.

No one really doubts that the human/machine interface will come. In fact, with the advent of pacemakers, artificial hearts, contact lenses implanted into the eye, and the recent announcement by Illinois’ Northwestern University of plastic lungs many people believe we’re already there.

But the mind/machine interface is the Holy Grail of cyborg culture and however unlikely it may seem, British Telecom aims to be at the forefront of that technology. And there can be no doubt that the first company to patent a way of recording life as it happens would be sitting on a goldmine. And it’s easy to see why.

It’s not just the mind-numbing, scary applications like cloning yourself, or seeing if there isn’t some way to download that 10 terabites of life-data into a computer to produce a real ghost in the machine. The real money would be in entertainment.

Just think about, TV is saturated with real-life drama. Every emergency service imaginable has had a fly-on-the-wall documentary team trailing after it. There isn’t a hospital - adult, children’s or pet - that hasn’t hosted its own TV show. The channels are stuffed to the gills with crying chat-show and on-screen confessions...

Now just imagine that instead of some two-timed woman sobbing into her Kleenex, Vanessa features direct ‘mind clips’ from the woman, her two-timing partner, the other woman... Not just people talking about it, but the audience actually seeing, feeling, smelling it. The very idea would turn TV and entertainment upside down.

And how long before some latter-day Chief of Police announces on the 6 o’ clock news that, ‘If you’re innocent you’ll have nothing to fear from letting the police take a look at your chip.’ Bang go elaborately-constructed alibis, either you were at the scene of the crime or you weren’t...

We already live surrounded by surveillance cameras, with our lives recorded on credit ratings, car licences, DHS records. Even some mobile phones can be used as tracking devices. Do we really need our secrets recorded for all to see? And do we want to live with our past ever fresh in our minds?

Which one of us is going to be able to resist re-playing that ugly argument or that nasty break-up until we know it word for word. One of the good things about life is that memories do eventually fade, good and bad, they’re designed that way to let us get on with the rest of our life. Having it on tape, in our heads may not be the best option, especially not if the police, governments, ever our employers are going to start demanding to know what we all do behind closed doors!

Getting back to Strange Days, there’s a line in the film where someone points out, ‘the question isn’t whether you’re paranoid, it’s whether you’re paranoid enough...’

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