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"I received a nice letter the other day from the Dalai Lama. He had read 'The Nine Billion Names of God'. It is about a computer at a Tibetan monastery."
- Arthur C. Clarke
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| SimStim | ||
| Stimulation of the brain and nervous system of one person using a recording (or live broadcast) of another person's experience. |
This is a way of sharing experience, but in the world of Neuromancer, you are reminded of the early comments that the experts had about television: "it's an ideal teaching tool."
| Cowboys didn't get into simstim, he thought, because it was basically a meat toy. He knew that ... the cyberspace matrix was actually a drastic simplification of the human sensorium, at least in terms of presentation, but simstim itself struck him as a gratuitous multiplication of flesh input. |
| Technovelgy from Neuromancer,
by William Gibson. Published by Phantasia Press in 1984 Additional resources -
|
As far as I know, Gibson is the first person to explore both a business use and the extended entertainment version of this idea. Simstim can also be done live.
An earlier reference in science fiction to the idea of using some sort of technology to both read and record a person's thoughts is the espionage machine from Cordwainer Smith's 1958 story No, No, Not Rogov!.
A much earlier reference to the idea that one person can actually experience the transmitted experience of another can be found in the wonderful 1939 story Masson's Secret, by Raymond Z. Gallun. Read about the neuronic receptor-transmitter. See also the Life Chamber from The Chamber of Life, by G. Peyton Wertenbaker., published by Amazing Stories in 1929. Just found the psycho-phone from David Keller's 1928 A Biological Experiment.
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'...each of them is a neural mapping of the mind of a Tibetan monk who actually lived.'
'...there's a narrow belt where the climate is moderate.'
'The leg was to function, in a way, as a servo-mechanism operated by Larry’s brain, through the mediation of the electronic brain in the leg.'
'... every veephone on the continent would display, over and over, two propositions.'
'Completely silent, accurate up to about twenty meters. No recoil...'
'He wore spectacles with thick wavy lenses. The spectacles were intended to make him not only half blind, but to give him whanging headaches besides.'
