Okay. I will admit, I like Chuck, the new weird and funny NBC series about a nerdly guy (in fact, the head nerd of the Nerd Herd, employed by Buy More to help its electronics-befuddled customers) who suddenly becomes a superspy. But I was wondering about the plot conceit: Chuck gets an e-mail from his old college roommate that contains all the secrets of American spydom, and as the images and content of the e-mail unfold, all of that information is imprinted in Chuck’s brain, like, forever! So a random sight can trigger a flood of Very Secret and Important Memories.

To find out whether such a thing could happen, I called Alex Martin, Chief of the Cognitive Neuropsychology Section, Laboratory of Brain and Cognition, at the National Institutes of Health. His job title is so impressive that I do not understand it all.  I asked: Could you really download memories into a human brain? “No way,” Martin said. “There’s no way to pour knowledge into your head. It always takes work. A cup of coffee will help.” So now I’m developing my own series: Joe, about a guy who swills Starbucks and becomes a supergenius. 

-Marc Silver

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