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The Future of Putting Chips Inside Our Brains
Roland Piquepaille writes "Researchers at the University of Florida (UF) have developed chips which someday might be inserted in the brains of people affected by epilepsy or who have lost a limb. These neuroprosthetic chips 'can interpret signals in the brain and stimulate neurons to perform correctly.' The University claims this is the future of medicine. This is maybe a little bit extreme. Just the same, the researchers are already studying these chips with rats and hope to have a prototype ready within 4 years that could be tested on humans."
"The future of medicine." I'm sure. In any case, I'm always happy to hear about something to help people to live better lives, even if it sounds a bit too much like something out of a cyberpunk novel. What does concern me are things such as, say, sensitivity to EMP. I'm sure that there will be ways to work around this... This is interesting: "We have intermediate designs that connect to the brain, interpret signals and can wirelessly send commands to devices," he said. "This is another path of technology we're pursuing." While the summary doesn't mention this, the prospect of controlling things across the room with a thought is perhaps not as far away as one might think.
How about something that filters out pointless conversation instead? In the middle of some intense thinking and and some numbskull walks wanting to share some boring story again? Expecting an urgent email but tired of reading each message as it pops up? Tired of having to concentrate and focus on "conversation" with the Wifey or kids (aka, saying "uh-huh" at the right time)?
Get a Conversation Coprocessor! It handles mundane written and verbal conversations for you! Worried about missing something important? Conversation Coprocessor records all conversation for later review and recall. If any current conversation meets the conditions you specify as being "worth attending to" it immediately triggers a small sneezing/coughing/belching fit and plays back the previous conversation buffer to you. End result: you waste less time on pointless conversation and are able to time-shift conversations! It's like Tivo for conversation.
Now I can stop moving altogether and type only with my mind, thus completely leaving the animal kingdom.
Philosophy.
That's an interesting thought. I have synesthesia , so I'm very familiar with experiencing certain things in ways that are foreign to most other people. It's interesting to ponder what types of sensations can be created by external forces applied directly to the brain. Some studies have shown that direct stimulation to some parts of the brain can produce first-person sensations, such as smell, taste, etc. I think that some type of great leap in the way that we understand the brain would be necessary before something like that could even be thinkable. Concerning your statement that we don't reach our brain capacity in our lifetime because we're slow at learning, there appears to be evidence to the contrary. First, consider all of the information we take in. It's true that most people do not assimilate (as far as we know) all of the textual, factual information that they encounter. However, we remember so much more than simple factual information. We remember not only facts, but events and sensations. We, furthermore, remember the associations. Consider this: In just one day, what is there to remember? There are people, conversations, feelings, environments, thoughts, countless objects. We don't necessarily remember all of it, but we remember quite a bit. Also consider some exceptional cases of people who can remember everything that they read (and read extremely quickly). There was a video about such a person on YouTube, but I can't seem to find it. He not only read at an incredible rate, but also could do calculations extremely quickly and reproduce entire landscapes. His brain has yet to get "full.' In addition, any autistic people have been shown to factor large primes extremely quickly. In any case, I think that it is very premature to refer to the brain as though it is merely a biological computer with a biological hard drive.
... And then brain spam. Must buy more viagra...Must buy more viagra...
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
Must be a bitch when you come in for a next-gen upgrade and it uses a different socket. =/