Larry Page & Sergey Brin’s ultimate fantasy

I was just thinking some time ago as to how I’m just wasting my time sitting idle. I thought I should be reading a book or learning something. As I was thinking about this a thought came to my mind. I was imagining if there would be some way to quickly assimilate a book. Faster than speed reading, some what like what sci-fi movies show robots doing. Reading a book in a minute or so. Then, I thought, I would be able to assimilate all the information in the world This led me to thinking about the mission statement of Google – “To make easily accessible to people all the information of the world.” Then I put two and two together and started wondering whether Google would someday introduce a tool to allow people to index and search their own brains. That would be Larry Page’s & Serge Brin’s ultimate fantasy come true. Here’s my description of what it would be like.

It would consist of a hardware chip installed behind the ear which would do the necessary indexing, preferably during sleep. It would draw electricity from the nerve impulses within the brain. To active the search, all you have to do is to touch together the tips of the index and ring finger of both your hands. Then say out the search query (or in a more advanced and private version, just think about it). Close your eyes, and the Google chip will display the search results directly on your retina. Say out (or think about) the serial number of the result you want to browse, and your brain will retrieve and display the memories to you in full vividness.

With such a tool, you’ll never feel the embarrassment of forgetting the birthdays of your girlfriends or your marriage anniversary. It will help you to remember your shopping list without writing it down. You’ll make and remember more contacts because you remember everyone’s name correctly. You’ll never need to take your camera with you anymore. Just sit back and surf back to that last picnic on the beach with all your classmates, to the first day you drove a car, to the day when you first went on a date. Whenever you miss your boyfriend or girlfriend, just close your eyes and do an image search. Post-it notes will be a thing of the past, with all the to-do lists stored in your brain and ready for retrieval literally at your fingertips.

Of course, one problem with this kind of technology would be faced during gameshows. Everyone will become a crorepati dwitiya times. In exams, students will be able to access their brain for page to page, word by word description of the answer. A solution to this would be to install lockable rubber caps on finger tips of students while exams so that they rely on their natural memory. But then in such an age, why would anyone want to rely only on their memory anymore?

Some of this seems too fantastic to be real today but I’m sure one day, technology will reach a level when using such a tool will be as common as using a computer.

What would such an application look like? Here’s an example. Hold together your fingertips and close your eyes! :-)