

How much would you pay to have a small memory chip implanted in your brain? - edw519
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/13/magazine/13wwln-essay-t.html?ei=5124&en=7200b19ac5d16085&ex=1365652800&partner=digg&exprod=digg&pagewanted=print

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phaedrus
This is based on the fallacious premise that the limitations of the human
brain are that it "doesn't store enough bits" or that those "bits" aren't
getting stored permanently enough. In fact the human brain is a much denser
information storage and processor than anything we've yet built. You don't
think that, if it were actually useful for the brain, that nature could not
have built a reliable information storage that rarely loses data throughout a
person's lifetime and copies it faithfully? Look at DNA. That's a place where
such a thing is useful. In a brain experiencing the ever-changing world,
totally permanent storage is _not useful_ , in fact it's counter-productive. I
should know - I have eidetic memory and near-total recall, and I can barely
function sometimes because I can't sort out what's relevant to a situation
from details that are not relevant. The reason normal memory is fallible and
discards a lot of detail is that that is important for _thinking_. Which by
the way leads to another fallacy of ideas like the one in this article: data
!= information, and more data != better thinking

Even if such a device could be made - and it cannot; how would you connect it?
There is not one "memory link" in the brain like some kind of freakin' USB
port that you could reverse engineer a serial code for - even if it could be
done, it would actually make things worse for you, not better.

