“Hughes and Lockheed are in on it. Some department in the Air Force has been very active.”
The significance of the remark didn’t hit Corrigan just then. He was still telling himself inwardly that he would have to make a point of keeping more up to date with the literature in future. Get back to being a scientist again, and forget trying to turn into a corporate politician. Being back in academic surroundings was reawakening his appetite for intellectual excitement.
Evelyn was studying some charts of neural organization fixed to one of the walls. Corrigan’s background was software rather than interfacing, and his personal expertise at the working level lay in the area of self-modifying associative nets. What Hans was describing came closer to the kind of work that Evelyn had had experience of at Harvard and was now doing with Shipley.
“Hans, what are these references to `resonance modes’ here?” she asked curiously. “I use this mapping system practically every day, but I’ve never come across those before.”
Hans stepped across and looked pleased, rubbing the palms of his hands together and showing teeth with lots of metal. “Ah, yes, very good. You spotted it.” He nodded approvingly at Corrigan. “You’ve found a smart lady here, Joe.”
“And what else would you expect?”
Hans looked back and forth, taking in both of them. “This is something fairly recent that we’ve discovered through DSA. It’s quite exciting—something that I think you will find particularly interesting, Joe. We call it associative neural resonances.”
Corrigan’s eyebrows rose. “Which are? . . .”
“Shortcuts to generating complex pictures inside the brain. We’ve found that triggering just a few, precisely selected, neuronal groups can activate entire chains of connected imagery.”
“Wilder Penfield’s experiments, back in the forties,” Evelyn tossed in.
“Yes,” Hans agreed. “Except we can do it from the outside.” He glanced back at Corrigan. “You know how extraordinarily lucid dreams can be, yes? The images can be so rich in detail that it’s often impossible to tell whether one is asleep or not.”
“Sometimes I’ve been awake for five minutes before I realized I wasn’t awake yet,” Corrigan said.
“Exactly.” Hans nodded and went on. “Obviously that information isn’t coming from anywhere outside. It was already present there, in the mind. Random firings can set off whole trains of them that are linked together, which we experience as dreams—or it may be firings that are predisposed by recent repeated activity due to worry, intense emotional contexts, and that kind of thing.”
“Like the way a bell rings,” Evelyn said. “The complexity of the sound has nothing to do with how you hit it, or what with. It was already there implicitly, in the bell’s structure.”
“And with language,” Hans said. “Words are just a code system to trigger associations already established in the listener’s neural system from the experience of living. The information is in the listener, not the speaker. It seems to be a general characteristic of the neural system. And that is what we are learning to control. Activating just the right set of primitives can cause amazingly detail-rich images to be generated in the visual system. By `playing’ the input combinations like a keyboard, we can induce complete event-sequences to order, inside the subject’s mind, without having to inject huge data streams to specify every detail. We simply reactivate what’s already there. Much faster than conventional brute-force graphics. Much more efficient.”
The significance was apparent immediately. Here, possibly, was a totally new way of approaching the problem that Corrigan’s group had been grappling with of representing major portions of the real world. Instead of trying to supply every detail of an image, feed in just the right cues and let the subjects fill in the details themselves, from the inside.
But surely it couldn’t be that simple. Hans watched the frown forming on Corrigan’s face, knowing the objection that was coming.
Finally, Corrigan said, “These resonances. Are they unique—different for each individual? Or does everyone share the same ones? . . . I mean, if they’re unique, they can’t produce the same world for different people.”
“Yes, I know what you’re saying, Joe. But the fact is, there does seem to be a surprising degree of commonality. We are still very much in the fact-gathering stage, but the way it looks is that similar input code patterns do result in similar things being perceived by different people.”