History

Much of the technology which contributes to your Memory, Ltd. experience has been in common use for sometime, only it has never before been used in conjunction with our breakthrough new technology: the Visual Memory System (VMS).

Mental image transmission has been under development since 1896, when d'Arsonval conducted the first experiments with transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) and laid the groundwork for future researchers in the field. Around 1911 several scientists, including Dunlap, Magnusson, and Stevens, reported the phenomenon of magnetophosphenes, that is, visual sensations caused by the stimulation of the retina due to changing magnetic fields. By the 1940s, Barlow, Kohn, and Walsh were all able to effectively use TMS to create distinct visual patterns in human test subjects, however none discovered any way to transmit a specific image.

These techniques were investigated only occasionally and with few advancements, until the work of Greere and Rheingold in the 1960s. Motivated by the ramifications of this under-explored realm of human experience, these scientists pushed the limits of using EM fields to induce new patterns of neural activity. By 1972, they achieved startling success, precisely controlling the images propagated by the EM fields and received by the test subjects. However, since the apparatus which they used was excessively large and expensive, and as the image transmissions tended to be fragmented and insubstantial, few researches took an interest in expanding the work for commercial applications.

In 1989, Devan Brown formed Sensory Engineering, a loose knit research collective focused on the exploration of new technologies for design and translation of sensory experience. Over the next 9 years, 23 scientists, engineers, artists, programmers, and technicians contributed their creative energies to the development of the Visual Memory Inducer (VMI), the Visual Memory Recorder (VMR), and the software database system to both collect and assemble memory streams. In 1998, one of the principle researchers, Isa Gordon, began training as the first Certified Memory Technician. In February of 1999, the first public tests were conducted in Phoenix, Arizona, and were met with unexpected success. Memory, Ltd. was born.