| Really great question! Former PhD in Neuroscience here. I spent many years building systems and algorithms to decode neural activity in rats. I've been out of neuro for almost a decade now so some of this is out of date, so take this all with a grain of salt. The TL;DR is yes but its insanely hard and we're decades away from knowing how to do this (if not longer). We still lack the technologies to interface with individual neurons. We're good at reading from a handful of neurons, we very good are reading from a population of neurons. When it comes to writing there are a number of problems that need to be solved. First we haven't cracked the "neural code". We don't have a unified theory of how information is represented across the brain. We do have some idea of what individual brain region are doing but the codes used by each region can be wildly different. I'm not as caught up on my neuro literature as I would like but its completely possible their isn't a unified code and therefore we'll need to learn how each specific neural population encodes information. The software analogy here is we're trying to reverse engineer a system running in product without the source code and each module was written in a different programming language that we've never encountered before. Second we do not have mechanisms to write to individual neurons at the population level. The best we can do is akin to blasting a loud speaker at a crowd of people. We can push around the population but we cannot do much more than that. Software analogy here, what we can do its more akin to Steve Balmer yelling "Developers, developers, developers" than a class room instructor teaching students python. Opto-genetics is a potential path forward here but it requires controlling the genome of an individual and really only lets you target specific neural populations rather than any neuron in the brain. Third, we still do not understand where the memories or information live exactly. We know what brain regions are involved but we're a long ways away from truly understanding how long term information is consolidated to the cortex from the hippocampus and other structures. Finally, lets assume we know how to do all of the above (in rodents). Translating the science to humans is going to be a Herculean task for a bunch of reasons. Some of these reasons are scientific while others are ethical. The immune system of the human brain is more aggressive than in other animals and tends to reject implants more quickly. Next finding human test subjects is akin to sending someone to Mars. You're putting their life at risk and there's not true way for them to come back. Nearly all of the human subjects in studies that required invasive brain surgery were suffering from medical conditions so severe that the risk of the condition was greater than surgery and the research was piggy-backed on top of a planned medical intervention. |
So we've got to fight that battle as well.