This story about the artificial hippocampus has been all over the web; I covered it in NewsTrolls a few days ago but not here because I didn't really see the connection with online learning. But in thinking about it, I began to see some possibilities. The hippocampus, after all, is the part of the brain that encodes experiences so they can be stored as long-term memories elsewhere in the brain. Now if we have an artificial hippocampus, we can obtain digital recordings of those experiences. This would means that a person would not have to have the actual experience in order to have a memory. So we could set up a system whereby output from an artificial hippocampus is fed directly to a person's brain (the device would be called a 'hippoplayer,' of course, since it would be like a CD player for experiential memories; kids would trade 'hippos' the way they trade songs today). There would be a market for skilled professionals, equipped with an artifical hippocampus, to do difficult things - like brain surgery, say - for recording and transmission to students. Of course, they wouldn't thereby know how to be a brain surgeon, but they would know what it feels like to successfully complete brain surgery.
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