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Your Brain May Have Amazing Powers
I've never given much credence to the "only use 10% of our brains" urban legend, but this article,
Savant for a Day,
is making me reconsider. I'd like to see controlled, double-blind studies, but Snyder's machine already sounds very interesting -- hey, anyone can
learn to draw,
but I want to flip a switch to put my brain into calculator mode. EM-brain experimentation has taken off since
Michael Persinger's work and
other recent research.
Isn't that what Einstein said? Anyway, that link seems to be down, but I just saw a documentary yesterday night on the telly, where they trained people to modify their brainwave activity to move a player through a video game. I think this only scratches the surface - there's a lot of potential that we probably don't even know about... I would be glad to add a few more percent to mine, that's for sure - LOL :-)
.. about as much as really fit people want instant and fully working diet pills for everybody.
If everyone was smart, the smart would loose their advantage. The same goes for knowledge. If there was a really easy way og absorbing knowledge, where would the power and fun of knowledge be?
Besides, I don't generally buy the notion that education for everyone would lead to world peace. I know about lots of extremely smart and knowledgable people that are just as (if not even more so) greedy, corrupt and violent as average Joe.
Yeh right! Just like Michael Angelo. Leonardo Da Vinci could not only draw and sculpt, but was also a great mathematician and scientist.
Very very few tap into the brains potential. The few that have AND used it, are some of the most remembered people of all time!
It wouldn't make much sense for us to have evolved brains that were 10 times larger than they had to be -- If such a huge portion wasn't being used, those with larger brains wouldn't have been selected above those with smaller brains. Those individuals with the most efficient use of brain would have been selected since they wouldn't have to supply all the extra brain matter with oxygen and food.
Since most of a modern CPU's transistor count is cache memory you'ill probably find that outside the control unit at any one time even less than 10% of the transistors are active. If you include the number of transistors present for main memory in the mix that percentage gets even lower.
I looked at the 'before and after' section of the learn to draw site. It did seem that the variety of the 'before' pictures was squashed into the standard 'after' style. In particular I personally feel that the before in this picture shows more promise than the after.
-Yarn - Rio Karma: Excellent
As I recall from college anthropology, human childbirth is painful (and sometimes even fatal) precisely because our craniums are so large, relative to other mammals and relative to the size of our frames. (Humans have the highest ratio of brain mass to body mass; whales come in second.) If so much of our brain mass were hypothetically unnecessary, then humans with smaller brains would be more likely to pass on their genes, as those childbirths would less frequently be fatal. Over time, humans would come to have much smaller craniums (90% smaller, if the urban myth were true), not the large craniums that we currently possess. The fact that evolution is willing to pay such a high penalty (increased childbirth fatalities) for large brains indicates that there must be an offsetting evolutionary advantage to having large brains. The notion that much of our brain is therefore "unused" doesn't really make sense from an evolutionary standpoint.
I hope that after I die the one word people use to describe me is "resurrected."
"Two minutes after I started the first drawing, I was instructed to try again. After another two minutes, I tried a third cat, and then in due course a fourth. Then the experiment was over, and the electrodes were removed. I looked down at my work. The first felines were boxy and stiffly unconvincing. But after I had been subjected to about 10 minutes of transcranial magnetic stimulation, their tails had grown more vibrant, more nervous; their faces were personable and convincing. They were even beginning to wear clever expressions. I could hardly recognize them as my own drawings, though I had watched myself render each one, in all its loving detail. Somehow over the course of a very few minutes, and with no additional instruction, I had gone from an incompetent draftsman to a very impressive artist of the feline form."
I would think a more convincing experiment would be to start with the machine turned on for the full "10 minutes", the cat drawing made, then the machine turned off and another made. If this is correct then the second should actually be worse than the first.
The idea that the ability to draw better cats improves as you practice doesn't seem terribly startling.
My
Limekiller
I'm saying that people should be allowed to do to themselves what they want. This is not to suggest that people should be allowed to do things like drive while intoxicated. Then you begin to create a hazard for other people. If you want to do ecstacy, go ahead. And if you want to shower your brain with electromagnetic stimulation, go bonkers.
One might object that drug use creates a burden upon the rest of society. Well, so does a belief in a god yet that isn't made illegal.
My
Limekiller
I took the article to overstate the practical significance to a certain degree, and to ignore the downide. If I read it correctly, the point is that we might be able to gain certain savant abilities by turning off parts of our brains that are responsible for other very valuable abilities. It might be really valuable to be abale to do this to yourself for a short period when you have to do certain kinds of tasks, but it is not like we would want to go through our lives wearing a headband that would keep us in this kind of state. We don't want to become autistic, just so we can be "idiot savants."
This post is dedicated to all of those
I've met in my country people that tell that humans only use 10% of their brain ability. They usually want to use 100% of the money of their victims.
-- (but in fact only ÂAPT has Super Cow PowersÂ)
That's because most of the "drugs are bad, mmkay" stem from traditions based on people trying to further their own importance. Marijuana was banned not because it gets you high, but because it makes good rope. Speed was a drug dealt out often for various illnesses and weight loss, but if you have a heart condition and you take a shitload, you can die. No shit? Ecstacy and cocaine, were medicines, until the moral police decided they needed some floor space and "won't somebody think of the children" filled the air.
Send lawyers, guns, and money!
Please reply with some proof that believe in God, in and of itself, creates a burden on society. I don't get Presbyterian Welfare, last I checked. Religious institutions are supported by their believers. In fact, they draw in money which is used for charitable purposes, thus aiding society. Tithing is part of both Christianity and Islam, and possibly others. It seems like you just threw that in because it's a popular opinion to have around here.
I'm not talking about misguided people who misinterpret their chosen belief system and use that as justification to harm others. That has almost nothing to do with belief; in some cases it's a result of _religion_, but other things could be substituted.
WMBC freeform/independent online radio.
While I support your point about the inherent double standard in the 'developed world,' I wouldn't be surprised if this line of research were decried. To many, including myself (without additional, credible research), this smacks of 21st century charlatanism. Additionally, since this is not a drug in the common sense (ie, produced by some major pharmaceutical company) you will see a great deal of backlash from that sector to debunk and quash this line of research.
Using more of your brain to perform cognitive tasks doesn't necessarily make you good at it. Let's say "brain use" as an increase blood flow/activity to a brain area. Novices show much more activity than experts to the same brain areas. As novices get more experience with the task, their brain activity decrease. So does low brain usage mean low competence? This is one of the many reasons why you must be careful when intepreting fMRI and other brain imaging scans.
If anything it seems that the more brain you use, the more you are struggling. To paraphrase what David Field of Cornell University said a couple of years back at my school:
I use 10% of my brain but on good days, I only use 7%.
The article isn't talking about letting you use more than the 10% of you brain. The process actually limits much of your brain use giving a greater degree of focus.
People tend to think that if we only use 10% of our brain, if we could use that other 90% then we'd be much smarter or have some magnificent insight. I think that the other 90% is probably just about as smart as the 10% we use. With all that brain power working at once there would be no way to concentrate.
If voting changed anything, they'd make it illegal -- Jello Biafra
What you have to understand is that nobody selects. I mean, an insect is really less evolved than a human, not to say an amoeba, and they are not marked for extintion per se.
Actually an insect is arguably more evolved than us, since it's generation time (and that of it's ancestors) is much smaller. An amoeba is incredibly more evolved, in the sense of total change since it's last common ancestor with mammals.
Selection is not an invisible hand striving for perfection, there's not a biologist on the planet worth his weight in salt who'll say that. Selection is a instantaneous direction, a random walk through the fitness landscape. At every given moment, the selection pressure is for what would most benifit a population (not individual) right now, with no consideration for the future or perfection. There's no appeal to a nature-god, no inferior or superior (let alone perfection), just a constant changing of directions for the immediate survival.
I have borderline high-functioning autism myself. Regarding "special talents" (with me anyway) - it comes and goes. I can't switch it on/ off. Regarding the chairs if there were 6 rows of 8 chairs it isn't that hard to count. The ability to remember musical melodies isn't that difficult - and can be learned. It's part of most musician's training to be able to memorise not just a riff but entire pages of music. If you've taken a music exam you have to sing back a few phrases played to you - which is not far off playing them. I get the tension headaches too - one of the downsides of the frustration caused by having a communication disorder and being misunderstood.
Video Game cheats, hints a
Plenty of hostility around towards people who believe in God.
There people who believe it's a great idea to spend tons of money to overclock their CPUs (when they can just buy a faster one). And they don't get as much hostility around here.
And why is that?
Cocaine is actually pretty similar in danger to caffeine, except that it is usually found in the US in a purified form. If you got caffeine in a similar form, it would probably kill you. Most cultures use one stimulant and prohibit others; it's pretty random that ours picks caffeine as good and cocaine as bad.
MDMA is quite safe: the main danger is that it encourages activity and suppresses thirst. If you take it at an all-night party without a lot of non-diuretic drinks, you can easily cause severe dehydration. It also causes a temporary burnout if you don't take an SSRI with it. If you try to take it frequently, it has no effect, and taking more than the appropriate dose doesn't matter.
Cannabis makes you think unclearly. If you spend too much time thinking unclearly, you can learn to do so all the time. It is therefore about as bad for you as listening to presidential addresses.
I'm not familiar with what is necessary for safe use of heroine. Most likely, a trained anaesthesiologist.
Things on fire cause cancer and burns; snorting and injecting things makes it easy to surpass the safe dosage (which is much harder to do by ingesting things).
Most controlled substances don't really require more responsibility than legal ones. Of course, street drugs are more dangerous than packaged ones, due to concentration and impurity, and street drug administration methods are more dangerous than using your stomach. Some controlled substances will impair driving, but plenty of OTC drugs do, too, and in worse ways.
This reminded me of two things. First, Larry Niven came up with the idea of a tasp, a device which can remotely stimulate the pleasure center of someone's brain. He also came up with the idea of people running wires directly to the pleasure centers of their brains and thus achieving perpetual electric happiness (like a drug addiction). This might be around the corner.
Second, I am reminded of the "focused" people in Vernor Vinge's A Deepness In The Sky. They were basically slaves, but their masters made them into savants by using machines to permanently disable parts of their brains. That, too, might be around the corner.
Cool in a scary sort of way; science fiction still has predictive power.
Sunlit World Scheme. Weird and different.
This gadget is playing a pattern of magnetic signals, apparently through an 8bit DAC for each emitter. So by all appearances the patterns are copyrightable 'works' and copyright is eternal. (for all intents and purposes unless we kill Eisner/Disney) So assuming this guy isn't a quack for a minute, soon he will have an entensive library of all the patterns to enhance various mental abilities and perhaps even cure some mental diseases. But unlike the current medical companies which only get a patent for 10-19 years for a new drug or device, this guy could have an eternal monopoly on the 'content' to be played on this new machine. So while the machines themselves would eventually be dirt cheap, being knocked off in China, one person/company would have almost unlimited pricing power in making use of the new tech.
Where have we seen this pattern before? Talk about an oportunity for a vulture capitalist!
Democrat delenda est
Yes, in U.S. and European history, and still today in other parts of the world, not conforming to a set of religious beliefs means death and torture. However, in western history, and still today in other parts of the world, not conforming to a set of social practices, political ideology, or belief that the current people in power are somehow superior means death and torture.
Are god/divinity/"higher power(s)" usually tied to these things? Of course. That's a big fucking ace up your sleeve, but saying tool Y is used for X, therefore X is the only valid use of Y will get a very nasty response here if Y==P2P software, decryption, copying of media, DeCSS and so forth. (It may even mean death and torture
It's nothing but crumpled porno and Ayn Rand.