The New York Times yesterday morning (8/24/2023), like most days, has news of politics and war. Depressing to say the least. But that’s not what caught my eye. A front-page report was about new technology in which a young woman had a stroke 10 years ago that left her with multiple disabilities, including the inability to speak. She has been fed intravenously for a decade. Recently, she received electrode implants in her brain, and these were connected to a computer. And here’s the amazing part: the computer interpreted the brain waves into what she was trying to say, and then an avatar showed her on a screen resembling how she looked before the stroke and speaking with her recognizable tone of voice! She could communicate by speaking via artificial intelligence, which interprets her brain activity trying to say something. She was restored in a fashion. The article was careful to note that the interpretations were of sounds and muscle movements, not brain waves and thoughts alone. Fascinating.

I immediately thought of my collection of essays, Truth and Fantasy, in which I fantasize about downloading information into the human brain as if the brain was analogous to a computer, and then of connecting human brains wirelessly to transfer silent thoughts from one individual to another. I also proposed connecting a human brain to an animal brain to be able to understand what it’s like to be that animal, to have its brain, so to speak.

After these fantasy essays, I wrote a novel, Roger’s Thought-Particles, the second of the Jellyfish Have Eyes trilogy (all three novels republished in Science Fantasies), which proposes that thoughts can be transferred from one person to another in the form of infectious particles. Imagine, thought-particles emitted from one brain that transfers the thought to another brain! Now there’s fantasy: abstract thoughts having a physical representation that can infect someone else. Preposterous, no?

I was roaming in my imagination universe. But…

Maybe my fantasy is on a path to reality: brains downloading information from computers, AI interpreting and communicating brain waves into understandable language, brain waves…yes, waves, thoughts, language. Does that resonate with the wave/particle duality in physics in some way? Waves, thoughts, particles.

Much of what we know and developed started as incredulous ideas. What will tomorrow’s news report?