ABSTRACT
Where to now? I’ll personally settle for a good quality of life – freedom from dementia and an ability still to ‘go bush’ when the mood takes me, should I hit the Big Nine in just over another decade. By then the family genes will probably dominate, and the accumulated ‘slings and arrows of outrageous fortune’ – MY fortune – will by then have hit home, leaving their indelible, irreversible, stigmata. But by then, what wonderful new technical advances, ‘boys’ toys’, may there be? I would hope to have seen ambulant imaging become a reality, mapping activity in real time as we go about our routine, or very unusual, daily lives in an ‘ecologically valid’ fashion. Maybe structural and functional MRI (including connectivity analyses at both levels) may sync with electrophysiological measures, capturing both very fast and more gradual processes, with the option to include, simultaneously, transcranial magnetic and/or direct-current stimulation. Such procedures would take diagnosis, assessment, management and understanding to entirely new levels. By then, it may also be possible to radio-link to individuals, even at great distances from each other, so that the donor’s electrophysiological activity patterns may, via appropriate decoding and re-encoding, be fed to a recipient’s brain, so that the two may share a crude simulacrum of each other’s experiences and thought – ‘seeing through each other’s eyes’, as discussed earlier. Telepathy a reality?
