Sep 6, 2020 02:10 AM
https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2020...ind-waves/
EXCERPTS: . . . Mark Twain, though he did not go for spiritualism or immortality, would have agreed that siblings could tune into each other from opposite sides of the ocean. He believed, he once wrote, that a mind “still inhabiting the flesh” could reach another mind at great remove. There was an inciting incident in the spring of 1875 (before Twain’s red hair went gray), which he recollected as “the oddest thing that ever happened to me.”
The mail had just come at Twain’s home in Hartford, and he held a fat letter, still sealed. “Now I will do a miracle,” he drawled. He recognized the hand of someone from whom he said he hadn’t heard in eleven years. Even so, he knew without opening it that the letter contained a book idea. Their minds had been “in close and crystal-clear communication with each other across three thousand miles of mountain and desert on the morning of the 2nd of March.” Twain, in effect, had sat down to write to this very contact, on the same day, about this very same idea. Twain answered: “Dear Dan-Wonders never will cease.”
Dan De Quille was the alias of William Wright. In 1862, both men had started as staffers at the Territorial Enterprise in Virginia City, Nevada, and fast became a double-barreled force: the best writers at the hottest paper during the Silver Rush. De Quille was six years older than Samuel Clemens, who showed up, dusty, at twenty-six, as “Josh,” one of dozens of pseudonyms he tried on before becoming Twain.
[...] De Quille and Twain “often cruised in company.” They shared a desk. They shared lodging-a double bed. [...] The bromance had lasted less than two years. “Nevertheless, their association was more intense and long-lasting than has been appreciated, for their sharing of ideas and stories must have been so extensive as to constitute a common pool ... minds which were once so familiar and in tune with each other should continue to produce, even after the interval of many years, thoughts and compositions which bear the impress of the former partner.”
[...] In 1878, Twain wrote about mental telegraphy in A Tramp Abroad. And before going to press, he blotted all of it out. “I feared the public would treat the thing as a joke and throw it aside...” ... Finally, for Harper’s, sixteen years after he received De Quille’s letter, in December 1891, Twain trotted out his surety that egg salad incidents like ours were not accidents. ... A few years later, Twain returned to the subject of mental telegraphy in Harper’s with a fresh roll of examples. They were intricate.
[...] Three years before his heart attack, in 1907, he wrote that “inventions, ideas, phrases, paragraphs, chapters, and even entire books” could all flow brain to brain. He said, resigned, “I often originate ideas in my mind but get almost all of them out of somebody else’s.” The inevitability of unintentional plagiarism bothered him. In November of 1907, Twain heard about a new story by George Bernard Shaw. It echoed in both style and substance one he’d composed seventeen years earlier-“hilarious and extravagant to the verge of impropriety,” and unread by anyone, because Livy would not let it print. Twain concluded that “Mr. Shaw must have gotten those incidents out of my head…”
Twain was serious, and not way off. He anticipated brain-computer interface, for one thing. Last fall, the system dubbed BrainNet-a kind of phrenophone-allowed three people in different rooms to play a game of Tetris together with their minds. “I’m telling you about something so sci-fi,” Chantel Prat, one of the neuroscientists who developed BrainNet, said on a call. BrainNet uses a machine to decode brain activity from a sender brain, an electroencephalography (EEG) cap to record that activity, and computer software to translate it for a receiver brain. “It’s very much like a microphone,” Prat explained. “This electrode sits on the scalp and picks up the electrical activity that’s happening inside the head. The signal extends outside the head. We can-we do-record outside the head what’s happening on the inside of it.” I asked how far brainwaves can travel: Were we talking centimeters? Inches, feet-football fields? Prat could not say. But it was not across mountains, deserts, or oceans.
“Most of our thoughts transmit at 40-200 hertz. They can’t go very far,” she said. “But the brain is like a radio. Brainwaves come in different frequencies; some happen at 2-7 hertz, and those lower frequencies have a farther range.” Researchers studying neurosemantics at Carnegie Mellon are able to decode words and even sentences in our brainwaves, but Prat wanted to emphasize that we can decode much more than we can encode. “When we put info in the brain,” she said, “it’s a lot like a sledgehammer coming down: We cannot put an idea in the brain. We can make somebody’s finger twitch.” She appreciated Mark Twain’s cast of mind, though... (MORE - details)
EXCERPTS: . . . Mark Twain, though he did not go for spiritualism or immortality, would have agreed that siblings could tune into each other from opposite sides of the ocean. He believed, he once wrote, that a mind “still inhabiting the flesh” could reach another mind at great remove. There was an inciting incident in the spring of 1875 (before Twain’s red hair went gray), which he recollected as “the oddest thing that ever happened to me.”
The mail had just come at Twain’s home in Hartford, and he held a fat letter, still sealed. “Now I will do a miracle,” he drawled. He recognized the hand of someone from whom he said he hadn’t heard in eleven years. Even so, he knew without opening it that the letter contained a book idea. Their minds had been “in close and crystal-clear communication with each other across three thousand miles of mountain and desert on the morning of the 2nd of March.” Twain, in effect, had sat down to write to this very contact, on the same day, about this very same idea. Twain answered: “Dear Dan-Wonders never will cease.”
Dan De Quille was the alias of William Wright. In 1862, both men had started as staffers at the Territorial Enterprise in Virginia City, Nevada, and fast became a double-barreled force: the best writers at the hottest paper during the Silver Rush. De Quille was six years older than Samuel Clemens, who showed up, dusty, at twenty-six, as “Josh,” one of dozens of pseudonyms he tried on before becoming Twain.
[...] De Quille and Twain “often cruised in company.” They shared a desk. They shared lodging-a double bed. [...] The bromance had lasted less than two years. “Nevertheless, their association was more intense and long-lasting than has been appreciated, for their sharing of ideas and stories must have been so extensive as to constitute a common pool ... minds which were once so familiar and in tune with each other should continue to produce, even after the interval of many years, thoughts and compositions which bear the impress of the former partner.”
[...] In 1878, Twain wrote about mental telegraphy in A Tramp Abroad. And before going to press, he blotted all of it out. “I feared the public would treat the thing as a joke and throw it aside...” ... Finally, for Harper’s, sixteen years after he received De Quille’s letter, in December 1891, Twain trotted out his surety that egg salad incidents like ours were not accidents. ... A few years later, Twain returned to the subject of mental telegraphy in Harper’s with a fresh roll of examples. They were intricate.
[...] Three years before his heart attack, in 1907, he wrote that “inventions, ideas, phrases, paragraphs, chapters, and even entire books” could all flow brain to brain. He said, resigned, “I often originate ideas in my mind but get almost all of them out of somebody else’s.” The inevitability of unintentional plagiarism bothered him. In November of 1907, Twain heard about a new story by George Bernard Shaw. It echoed in both style and substance one he’d composed seventeen years earlier-“hilarious and extravagant to the verge of impropriety,” and unread by anyone, because Livy would not let it print. Twain concluded that “Mr. Shaw must have gotten those incidents out of my head…”
Twain was serious, and not way off. He anticipated brain-computer interface, for one thing. Last fall, the system dubbed BrainNet-a kind of phrenophone-allowed three people in different rooms to play a game of Tetris together with their minds. “I’m telling you about something so sci-fi,” Chantel Prat, one of the neuroscientists who developed BrainNet, said on a call. BrainNet uses a machine to decode brain activity from a sender brain, an electroencephalography (EEG) cap to record that activity, and computer software to translate it for a receiver brain. “It’s very much like a microphone,” Prat explained. “This electrode sits on the scalp and picks up the electrical activity that’s happening inside the head. The signal extends outside the head. We can-we do-record outside the head what’s happening on the inside of it.” I asked how far brainwaves can travel: Were we talking centimeters? Inches, feet-football fields? Prat could not say. But it was not across mountains, deserts, or oceans.
“Most of our thoughts transmit at 40-200 hertz. They can’t go very far,” she said. “But the brain is like a radio. Brainwaves come in different frequencies; some happen at 2-7 hertz, and those lower frequencies have a farther range.” Researchers studying neurosemantics at Carnegie Mellon are able to decode words and even sentences in our brainwaves, but Prat wanted to emphasize that we can decode much more than we can encode. “When we put info in the brain,” she said, “it’s a lot like a sledgehammer coming down: We cannot put an idea in the brain. We can make somebody’s finger twitch.” She appreciated Mark Twain’s cast of mind, though... (MORE - details)