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"Retire? Yeah, I want to die with my head in the typewriter. That's my idea of retirement."
- Alfred Bester
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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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'The leg was to function, in a way, as a servo-mechanism operated by Larry’s brain...'
'The observation vehicle was of that peculiar variety used in conveying a large number of people across rough terrain.'
'The real border was defended by... a swarm of quasi-independent aerostats.'
'I ... set my automatic astronomical instruments to searching for a habitable planet.'
'...haven't you a section of the factory where only robot labor is employed?'
