Relive someone's memories with Strange Days
Straight into your brain
Welcome to TechFinitive x FlashForward, our fortnightly newsletter where we pick a technology featured in a classic movie and fast forward to where it’s at today.
SQUID memory playback from Strange Days (1995)
Flashback: Happy New Year. Amid the chaos of a party/riot on New Year's Eve 1999, shady dealers buy and sell illegal recordings of a person's experiences which can be played back by users reliving the memory. It's called a Super-conducting Quantum Interference Device, or SQUID, and it consists of a mesh of electrodes that you put on your head to either record your own experiences or play back someone else's. "This is not, like, TV-only-better… this is life" explains Ralph Fiennes' sharp-dressed antihero Lenny Nero, who deals in SQUID experiences. "This is a piece of somebody's life, pure and uncut straight from the cerebral cortex. You're seeing it, you're hearing, you're feeling it."
Flashforward to today: The selling point of SQUID technology is that it allows you to experience things you can't do in real life. In real life, we turn to video games and, more recently, virtual reality for this kind of immersive experience.
Modern technology has overtaken Strange Days, in a sense: maybe we can't exactly feel what another person felt, but with a smartphone and social media you can share your experiences instantly with everyone in the world, without needing to fumble MiniDisks in sleazy bars. You can even stream your life live in real-time - which is relevant to the film's story about a video of cops killing a Black man, a plotline inspired by the beating of Rodney King in 1991 and presaging real-life police brutality exposed on smartphones and social media.
When sharing your experiences, there's still the limitation of having to pull your phone out of your pocket to capture a moment. To get around that, smart glasses with built-in cameras record from right where your eyes are, so the footage looks more first-person. Camera-equipped Google Glass specs were a bit of a false start back in 2013, but the new Meta and Ray-Ban smart glasses seem more interesting when today's augmented reality and artificial intelligence are factored in.
But what about SQUID's big selling point: the ability to connect directly with your brain? Believe it or not, it is actually possible to reconstruct what someone has seen by reading their brain activity. In 2011, scientists at Berkeley used brain imaging and computer simulation to reconstruct video clips that the test subjects had seen.
The first part of this experiment involved subjects lying in MRI scanners to track blood flow in the brain's visual cortex. To decode that, the researchers divided the brain into three-dimensional cube-shaped sections known as volumetric pixels, or 'voxels', and then figured out how activity in each voxel translated into shape and motion.
The results were videos of what the person remembered and saw in their mind. These were extremely blurry, but still recognisable as reconstructions of the clips the subject had seen.
According to the researchers, this is a step towards capturing internal imagery: recording and playing back memories and even dreams.
But the fact remains that the brain is a hugely complex thing that we're still trying to figure out. Scientists are still trying to figure out the 'connectome', a map of the brain. This wiring diagram of the human brain will help us figure out how neurons structurally and functionally interact with each other and will help us understand exactly how we think.
Will it sell?
A lot of money is being spent on figuring out how to control things directly with our minds. In 2022, the company behind Snapchat acquired a company called NextMind, while in 2019, Meta (then still known as Facebook) reportedly spent as much as a billion dollars on a company called Ctrl-Labs. Companies like these are working on brainwave sensors which read the electrical activity in your mind and translate that into actions. In other words, they read your mind and control something - a computer, say, or prosthetic limb - without you having to use your hands or move at all.
Elon Musk heads up Neuralink, a company which intends to implant chips in people's brains. But there are already plenty of devices which connect to your brain in a less invasive fashion. One example, currently on display at the annual CES technology trade show, is the Naqi Neural Earbud. These headphones use brainwave sensors to translate your thoughts into controlling a computer, typing text and even playing video games. The founder of Naqi originally set out to build something that would help a quadriplegic friend, but anyone could use it.
Another device that taps into the brain to help people with disabilities is the BrainCo prosthetic hand, which tracks brainwaves and muscle signals to move artificial fingers. The company claims it has enough dexterity to play the piano and write calligraphy.
Fun fact
A flop at the time but now critically appreciated, Strange Days was directed by Kathryn Bigelow from a story by James Cameron. It's worth a watch - but for a film about characters trying to get their hands on an elusive video disc, it's ironic that Strange Days is currently incredibly hard to find. You can get it on DVD and Blu-ray but it's almost impossible to stream, rent or buy online in the UK.
The Lenny Nero New Year's Resolution
Strange Days asks tough questions about privacy and voyeurism, with brutal POV shots of extreme violence that make the viewer complicit. As one character tells Lenny about the pornographic and violent SQUID experiences, "This is what people want and you know it!"
But there is a wholesome side to it, too: Lenny relives happy moments from his life, and a paraplegic character gets to run in the surf. And besides, for the viewers, it's all fantasy. At one point, Lenny tells a married man he can see what it's like to have sex with another woman "without even tarnishing your wedding ring". If you're only viewing someone else's experience, is it even cheating?
Verdict
Strange Days proved prophetic in exploring our insatiable desire to share experiences, even if that takes us to some dark places. A smartphone and data connection are all that's needed to experience what other people see and hear, but we're still working on a direct connection with the brain. If the prospect of Elon Musk putting a chip in your head sounds too Black Mirror, the most appealing thing about the film's SQUID tech is that it's non-invasive and doesn't require any kind of brain implant inside your body. Despite the movie's dystopian style, Strange Days offers a hopeful vision of technology that can be used by people with physical or mental challenges.
I can't believe you had to give them the damn links.
Ctrl-labs CEO: We’ll have neural interfaces in less than 5 years
What is the Connectome? Mapping Neurons in the Brain
Elon Musk’s brain implant company is approved for human testing. How alarmed should we be?
For similar movie done 12 years earlier, checkout Brainstorm (1983) with similar memory/experience recording and playback including deaths.