All of the below was completely made up. I have no scientific knowledge whatsoever.
(and I'm sure that people who do would realize this straight away upon reading it)
The human mind is something that the science community always has and always will strive to understand further. Having said this, we know very little answers to the mysteries of the brain, what it is capable of, and how it works. My name is Benjamin Butler, and I represent MrF, an advanced biological research group funded under the Australian Government’s $230 million Healthy Futures fund 2007. We believe that we have discovered a breakthrough in knowledge of how brain signals work, and a gateway to nearly unlimited further discovery.
We all know that every human brain reacts differently to certain input. Whether it be how someone reacts to a different style of music, a place, or an emotion, everybody interprets the happenings in their lives differently. In the past, science has attributed this to psychology, and simply concluded that past experiences, the circumstances of upbringing and growth are what decides the personality of an individual. We at MrF stand before you today to dispel that theory.
We were originally funded by the Federal Government as one of two teams to try and develop a bionic eye. While the National ICT Australia (NICTA) Victoria Research Laboratory came up with a working prototype that sends basic signals to the brain, allowing the user to recognise basic shapes and forms, we were much more specific in our work.
We wanted perfection.
Not content to waste time with a working prototype that would garner newsworthy but shallow results, we set about figuring out how the brain interprets signals sent by the eye’s retina, with the mantra that if we could crack the code, we would be able to perfectly replicate vision for the blind.
These signals has long thought to be impossible to find, or access for study, let alone de-code. Half way through our funded timeline, we believed that we were going to fail. No matter how specific our CAT scanning equipment and techniques were, the human brain was just so mind bogglingly complex, we believed we had no way of finding and singling out the information that we wanted.
But then we had a breakthrough. Our computer science technicians had created a program that was to be used to sort all of the information our scans picked up. Working on a hunch by one of our head doctors, Dr Meredith, we managed to isolate two sets of data from two test subjects. While they seemed completely different, using the same stimuli test on the vision of the subjects produced results that were similar enough to be considered a match by our percentages based matching system.
We had potentially found the stream of signals within the brain that determined the calculation of data received from the retina of the eye. While in the past it was thought that processing streams in the brain did not have a fixed position, thus making them impossible to decode, the repetition of results proved that they were indeed fixed. But why had science come op with the theorem of jumbled positions in the first place?
Because the streams were different between subjects. On further testing on various subjects, results for the same stimuli were different for each individual. This development, while rather significant, however left us in a paradox. How were we supposed to artificially create this data to send to the brain if it was for the same image to be seen by the bionic eye different in each case? This lead to our most stunning theory - that everybody sees different things to those around them.
Let me clarify. The human eye receives patterns of light, that lets say represent reflections of light off of a box. The light is interpreted by the eye into signals to be sent to the brain. But once they get to the brain they are then processed completely differently by every individual. So the brown box I see may look, say, pink to somebody else. But that separate person sees . . . A brown box. They have grown up accepting that cardboard boxes are that particular colour, and that that particular colour happens to be called brown. If this person was to see a box that looked to them the way I have always seen them, it would appear absurd.
But what if it went even further? Every person on the planet could see completely different colour spectrums! That is, my red may be as seen to your mind a colour that doesn’t even exist to my own knowledge. The colour spectrums we know are limited by the light waves they are carried by - the only colours that can possibly exist are defined by wavelength, etc. But there is nothing that limits how the brain may decide to show these colours to an individual’s sight. If this theory is true, than everybody on the planet lives on a completely different world visually, six billion different colour spectrums, that none of us could ever see. Due to our own brain’s interpretation, we could never even imagine that they exist. But we at MrF believe that they do.
After fully coming to terms with the implications of these discoveries, we wanted to know more. The bionic eye had become the excuse for us to use the funding we had received. But we wanted to do further research - if the brain interprets something such as sight differently, does it do the same to the other senses? Do my apples taste like your apples, do my roses smell like your roses?
We decided that audio signals were a way of continuing our testing in a way that we could replicate the stimuli perfectly. We set up further testing that built on top of our sight related findings, and through a lot of hard work eventually isolated the nerve centre of the brain responsible for the processing sound signals sent from the ear drum. Lo and behold, we very quickly deduced the same results for this sector of the brain as for the vision.
At this stage, after countless hours of study, calculations and testing, we had hit a wall in our research. We had deduced that every individual human being lives in a completely different world. There was not one person who saw what you saw, heard what you heard. The implications and possibilities that branched off of this were phenomenal. But having said that, would we ever be able to explore this any further? We could prove it existed, but each brain is not capable of accessing or even imagining the data that another would. We felt as though each person was trapped within their own set of sense-related rules.
At this stage of our research, the project was unexpectedly shut down. NICTA Victoria Research Laboratory had created their glitzy prototype, and it was hailed as a breakthrough on the world’s scientific scene. So why did we not expose our findings?
The government had funded two teams for one reason; they wanted results regarding a bionic eye. Theories that would require years more money and work to find information on an impossible sounding concept that would win them no votes was considered not important, and we were shut down. In the creation of the project terms, we had signed large waivers that gave the minister responsible for regulation of the project full rights to the information that was found. With these full rights came full choice of what was to happen with the information.
Under jurisdiction from a higher minister, it was deemed not only a waste of resources, but we were slammed with the threat that exposure of the information to anybody other that the particular politician had become illegal. We were left with a bombshell, one of the most amazing scientific discoveries of the century, but we couldn’t tell anybody because it wouldn’t win votes for the federal party like a bionic eye would.
However, we seeked legal advice. After reviewing the documents provided, our legal team found a loophole. We weren’t allowed to advertise our findings, that we had worked on the project, or project information on the project in any media. But it seemed as though if people came to us, wanting information, we could give it to them, just so long as they did not specifically ask for the findings of MrF, or anything similar. We had to find a way of making people want to find out more about a subject they were told no details of to begin with.
Thus we created a public game, a set of events that would leave people coming to us for information, which we could then exploit to voice our findings. We wish to make this a rich and exciting experience for the user, as a game that only leads to scientific data would not be followed with passion by the average user. As such a mixed media journey for the user was necessary, not to mention that fact that beginning the game would be completely voluntary, as decided by the legal limits.
