The 1000+500 is material costs, but if you've got a way to reduce the costs of materials, you can apply it to these values. Perfecting in this case would mean solving the temporal issues you're seeing in reliving the memories (not as relevant if you want a broad impression, but if you want to try to study a memory in detail it could be an issue), as well as making the whole rig a bit more portable (right now it's separate parts spread across a workbench).
I'll put an IC post up regarding getting yourself checked out.
They''re probably mostly like normal humans, but if prehysterical has some intersting opinions on this...