Time Travel !

A year back, during one of those coffee table chats, in the cafetaria of Microsoft, this imaginative idea of 'the third eye' popped up! Won't it be a great add-on for a human to have a mechanical camera eye, which will record everything in the world he sees! Well, there can be immensible possibilities with such an eye, but jokingly we were basically looking for an appropriate position to place that eye on the face and finally decided to put it in the un-utilized space at the center of the forehead! This later formed the basis for my cartoon "The third eye, everything is useful atleast twice" :)

Obviously, one of the main reasons I would love to have something like this would be, to see again those cherishing great moments of my life once again! Thinking about this further, what if we recorded not only the visual feedback from our eyes, but also the complete brain activity ? A kind of brain photo or whatever you call it! Its like an active snapshot of the brain activity for the duration of recording!

Elaborating it further, anologus to a video camera recording visual scenes, lets assume that we have a brain camera that records brain activies. Since recording brain activities include recording of the nerve signals from all the sensory points (that includes eyes, skin, ear, nose, tongue...). This, I will call the brain activity photo (BAP :) ). Now, if we have a mechaism of feeding the BAP back to the brain, may be in the subconscious level or as a dream (so that the actual functioning of the brain is unaffected), then wont this bring a feeling of time travel ?

How does it be equivalent to a time travel? Well, if you would formulate a Turing test for time travel, then one possibility would be to ask the testee what time he thinks he is in! And feeding the right set of BAP signals to his brain would obviously make him belive that he is actually in that particular timeframe! So I believe this is a kind of timetravel itself ! Well, there are psychological problems of belief that might come into picture here, like do you believe in the dream you see when you are seeing it or does your subconscious tell you that you are actually seeing just a dream and its not real? In that case, the model Turing test for timetravel might fail! But anyways, thats a different story!

Concluding, this is like getting a four dimensional photo of oneself, having all the three dimensional space cordinates and the fourth dimensional time cordinate. Anyways, this is just a feeling of time travel (which is actually real relative to the person) and is perfectly coherent unlike the quantum mechanical time travel paradoxes :)