Once they figured out how to decode our memories and then re-encode them on digital media for playback, Feedback was born and it was the greatest
thing since sliced bread.
Everyone I know has a personal Feedback device. Mine is a raspberry colored iMinder. My best friend, from high school, Jennifer, has a black Crave
with the extra mantra feature. I wish I had mantra, everyone else has it, but my iMinder is old and since I am now a college student, living on Ramen
noodles, and shopping at Savers, I can’t afford a new one. Mom says I am lucky to have any Feedback at all, but she’s just saying that because
she is hooked on it now. She never even used it until she and Dad got divorced and he moved out; now she is on Feedback all the time.
My Mom says my generation is the first to grow up that can’t remember a time without Feedback, just like her generation was the first generation to
grow up that couldn’t remember a time without cell phones. She got that from some email chain letter. You know the kind, “You know you’re
getting old when…” I don’t know why she always passes those things around. Mom is the first to be taken in by every sympathy or scare chain
email to go around.
Anyway, I was explaining about Feedback. It is the next Big Thing that came along after the Internet, cell phones, texting, streaming, Facebook and
Twitter.
The history goes something like this: “Back in the day”, the scientists at Duke University were working on the design of biofeedback
technologies, in the pursuit of mapping how the human brain works. They discovered how memory encoding occurs in the brain and how long term memories
are stored. This is good to know, but not very useful information unless one can figure out how to get the data back out of the brain.
So, next they tackled memory retrieval. The team was basically just documenting this information in order to continue mapping various brain
functions, until the genius behind the Feedback technology, a graduate student named Peter Lavinsky, realized the commercial potential.
If memories could be encoded and then
retrieved and recorded in a format such that they could be replayed to others then
we had an unbelievable new horizon of opportunity before us. He wrote a paper outlining his ideas, but it was largely ignored at the time, and he was
tragically killed in a fatal automobile accident a year after the paper was published.
However, the concepts that Peter Lavinsky laid out in his paper, eventually turned out to be exactly what happened. Since the Feedback revolution
started within the realm of Academia, the first folks to really sit up and take note were graduate Psychology students, looking for new research ideas
and funding for projects. They were concerned with the application of the technology toward human relationships. If individuals could experience a
disagreement from the other person’s point of view, then in theory they would come to a different understanding of the disagreement, leading to a
resolution.
Unfortunately, this was not at all the case. Instead, they found that people became more frustrated with each other when they experienced the other
person’s memory of an event. Not only did the other person’s experience fail to mirror their own – the other person tended to have a completely
different set of thoughts and feelings about the incident. Indeed, when it came to relationships, the rather inelegant and problem-prone Feedback
Loop (the first of many Personal Feedback Devices) destroyed far more than it rescued.
Still, the technology continued to be referenced in academic articles and it sounded sexy to Business and Marketing majors, who continued to throw
around possible ways to make it pay off. The next group to really embrace Feedback was Criminal Law. The biotechnology had been developed using
cadavers that had been donated for study, and the original memories that had been retrieved were final memories of the deceased.
(Continued...)
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edit on 28-10201210-1212 by gwynnhwyfar
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edit on 28-10201210-1212 by gwynnhwyfar because: (no reason given)
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by gwynnhwyfar because: (no reason given)
edit on 28-10201210-1212 by gwynnhwyfar because: (no reason given)
edit on
28-10201210-1212 by gwynnhwyfar because: (no reason given)
edit on 28-10201210-1212 by gwynnhwyfar because: (no reason given)