Is this reality? Or is my brain shoved in a box somewhere being fooled by an evil computer? Is this the real world or is it the Matrix? Scientists are finally getting closer to creating a false reality for a brain in a box.
The problem of knowing if what you see is real or fake is an old problem, a problem loved by philosophers. Descartes worried about this and concluded “I think therefore I am” but was always worried about knowing whether the real world was there. More recently, Daniel Dennett called this the brain in the box problem. How could you be sure you weren’t just a brain being fed false electrical signals by evil scientists? As a fan of the brain in the box problem, I’ve loved the movie “The Matrix”. It presents such a compelling version of the philosophical problem. You can even find the problem noted in pop music. In Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody”, Freddy Mercury sang “Is this the real life, is this just fantasy?”
Dennett concluded that we probably aren’t brains in boxes because the computational power to pull off the fraud would be beyond what any imaginable computational system could manage.
But neuroscience may finally be creating brains in boxes, fake realities, frauds that confuse us. In a recent paper, Ramirez and colleagues described a brain in a box experiment. They used mice instead of humans, but the research is cool on any number of levels. First they put the mice into one experimental context (box A). The researchers observed the pattern of neural firings in the hippocampus (a part of the brain important for place learning in mice and important for forming episodic memories in humans). Then the researchers placed the mice into a second context and this is where the cool things happen. The researchers caused the area of the hippocampus active in box A to turn on while the mice were in this new context. Then the researchers applied electrical shock. When the mice were returned to box A, they displayed fear – as if they expected electrical shock to occur.
The researchers, by activating the appropriate brain areas caused fear conditioning for the first box even though the mice were in a different location! By activating the right set of brain cells, the researchers made the mice see themselves as back in the first box. The brain cells were activated both by being in box A and by the researchers applying direct stimulation to the brain cells. The mice apparently couldn’t tell the difference between being in the box and having their brains directly stimulated.
Daniel Dennett is still correct about brains in boxes. Science does not yet have the computational capacity to create entire worlds and pipe those into your brain. But this study shows a dramatic step in that direction. Are you ready for the Matrix?
Ramirez, et al. (2013) Creating a false memory in the hippocampus. Science, 341, 387-391.