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Brain Power Boosted With Electrical Stimulation
Zothecula writes "With the possible exception of those affected by hyperthylmesia — a rare condition where a person has an extraordinary capability to recall events from their past — most of us wouldn't mind having our memory enhanced. That's just what appears to have happened to a group of mice when targeted areas of their brains were electrically stimulated. The treatment triggered an increase in the creation of new cells in the hippocampus, with experiment results suggesting the mice's spatial learning improved. The researchers responsible say the results could have implications for the treatment of memory disorders in humans."
The problem I have with augmentation is that unless heavily regulated, it will increase the gap between the classes, making it even more impossible to claim that people have equal opportunities.
And, if regulated, should it be mandatory, or voluntary?
For me, it's easy to say that I don't want this kind of augmentation - in order to be efficient, I need to forget a bunch of stuff. When I go to the parking lot to look for my car, I don't want to have to sort through 600 memories of having parked my car there, I just want one memory, which I can forget when I drive off. And I don't want to remember all the times my s.o. has said something that upset me. Forgetfulness is good.
But what about a child? Would it be able to object? Or understand reasons for objecting?
"Well, don't. A friend of mine tried one their "special offers," nearly got himself lobotomized." "No shit?" "Don't fuck with your brain, pal. It ain't worth it."
Hm, why do you think we haven't evolved with perfect memory? Could there be a good reason?
Unless you believe in intelligent design, there may be no reason at all, except that we're only as far along as we are and we work well enough to reproduce. Same reason most of us have relatively poor hand-eye coordination, can't do without oxygen for more than about 3 minutes, have problems with cancers, have our eyes go out of round, etc. Many species of animals do much better on all these measures.
As my old bio teacher used to intone, "evolution proceeds towards what works, not what's best."
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Harrison Bergeron was here.
Bruce Perens.
You are assuming that intelligence == more selfishness. In my experience, the more people learn and grow in life, the less selfish they become. As we progress as a culture, we are going to grow beyond the current view that men are inherently antisocial and competitive. Evolution has developed us to cooperate. Cooperation is a smart way to live. We'll figure it out. Don"t let all the bullshit fighting on television and newspapers make you think that's the way human beings really are. You know better. Look around. Don't be afraid of progress.
Currently hooked on AMP
How the hell did you remember that?!
I could swear that I have seen this news item on slashdot before. Maybe my brain needs a jolt.
I don't know that I have full blown hyperthymesia, I've never talked to a professional about it, I certainly don't recall EVERY day of my life in great detail but my friends and loved ones are often surprised at what I can recall and just how much trivial detail I can recall when doing so. I had a pretty bad concussion in 1997 which definitely affected my memory in a negative way, but I still still consider it to be far superior to most people.
Anyway, it is a curse to be forced to remember all of the worst days and moments of your life. Imagine constantly reliving your most painful or embarrassing moments. Imagine carrying around the burden of all of the not so nice things you may have done in your life, like the snippy retort you gave to the person that was marginally rude to you when you were tired. Imagine the insults and bullying that you endured not only through high school, but that the people you've cared about have thrown at you over the years during spats. Or maybe it was the time you made a suggestion at work or to a friend that everyone else has long forgotten but you still remember in vivid detail. I have detailed memories going back to the first house I lived in and we moved out of there when I was 6 months old.
Breakups can be hard, but remembering the little intimate details of your lost SO are worse, watching a loved one die in front of you, the laughter that still echoes in your mind from the time you had a piece of toilet paper stuck to the bottom of your shoe, etc. Sure, it's nice that you can remember all of the details the day your child was born or that trip you saved up your entire life for, but when you can't forget the things that your brain really needs to in order for you to move on, every day has the potential of being a living hell. It's basically a permanent state of PTSD and you never know when it's going to hit you.
After my concussion, I've lost some of the factual retention memory ability that wasn't related to my personal life, but, unfortunately, I still mentally "record" virtually every moment of my life. I can't always tell you the date (though I often can), but I can deliver the full visual, audio and tactile memory of those moments. Friends/family tend to love that I can remember the things that they can't and help refresh their own memories, but for me, it sucks.
Don't leave your mind so open that your brain falls out. Don't close it so much that you cut off the blood.
Ah, But the problem there is that there's no solipsist's lemma.
Philosophically speaking, the only thing you can be sure about is your own existence. You can also see that your senses are flawed, so you can't trust them either. You vividly hallucinate at night, and constantly misinterpret your senses during the day.
On these grounds, who's to say what is real and what is simulation?
OTOH, if we focus on information theory, and don't think about philosophy for a second, the real world out there has more than 10^100 "moving parts" than your own brain has, even if you count down to the atoms and electrons that make up your neurons... How could you possibly hope to simulate all of reality if the simulation itself is embedded within reality? That's a recursive nightmare.
No, you can only make approximate models of the "Real World Out There" and then that's only useful if you can prove that the real world out there exists.
Hectice, baby, Mercator says hello to you
Hm, why do you think we haven't evolved with perfect memory? Could there be a good reason?
Glucose limitations, probably. Sugar is something of a limited resource in most of the habitable zone and throughout human history.
Well, I know that people with really hot tempers usually have bad memories.
PTSD causes both irritability and atrophy of the hippocampus.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
And who would "change tape" in your brain when it's full?
How could you possibly hope to simulate all of reality if the simulation itself is embedded within reality?
Why, you'd use a good compression algorithm, of course. Every way of describing reality (except the wrong ways) is such an algorithm or part of it.
When we find the links between the different layers of abstraction, we're good to go, because then we know when we can apply, say Marxist analysis, to describe how capitalism oppresses the proletariat and leads to revolution also incorporating other abstractions like neuro-science and weather forecasting and such. At every level we just note the diff between the model and the specifics and when we get down to atoms bouncing off each other and strings vibrating (let's assume there is no randomness in quantum shit), we don't have to describe everything.
It's still kind of a daunting task, so I propose we wait for Moore to do it's thing until nearing the end of the universe and also build huge vacuum-cleaners that can pull lots of matter into them as to prevent those atoms and whatnot to interfere with measurements of other parts of the universe, so we can get a picture of exactly what there is, where it was going and how fast.
Some of my favourite people are from th US; Vonnegut, Chomsky, Bill Hicks.
Unfortunately, it's not as simple as keeping myself busy... to go along with my autobiographical memory, my brain seems to be very parallelized too. I'm often focusing on a number of different tasks independent from each other. Doing something in the foreground doesn't make the background thoughts go away.
Funny you mention dead cats... that immediately brought back the memories of finding both of mine dead. Where they were, what they looked like, how they felt, the slight warmth still left in their bodies, how their faces were positioned, how I felt emotionally, what was going on at the time, what type of day it what as well as the time of day, the other things I did during those days (visiting my dad in the hospital on one, waiting for my life insurance agent to come over to review my policy on the other).
Anyway, I suffer from Avoidant Personality Disorder and over the last 5 years or so, I notice I'm becoming increasingly agoraphobic as well. On top of that, I take care of my dad (who has been disabled for the last 13 years now), so I don't get out much (and for that matter, I don't have a job anymore, which further limits my ability to be around other people in several ways). My new memories are generally a mix of the mundane tasks of every day life combined with the time I spend with my mom and nieces usually on the weekends. The oldest niece seems to exhibit a lot of the same traits I did at that age, so I worry about her too.
I have some other issues going on as well that I'm not going to talk about in public, that contribute to my daily negative reinforcements. On top of that, something about me seems to attract predatory women and every woman I've ever cared about in my life has used and abused me (including my mom and sister) at some point. That, too, just reinforces the AvPD.
Mix it all together and most days, I wonder how I manage to cope... the guilt of knowing those around me would be worse off if I wasn't there is the main thing that keeps me going. I've had a lot of time to reflect on things and I understand pretty much everything ticking inside my head that makes me the way that I am. Unfortunately, even with the best of help, most of what's wrong with me isn't exactly easy to fix. I've tried cognitive behavioral therapy, pills, etc and none of it sticks for more than a few months at a time. Ultimately, it's the inability to repress my past (and ongoing) trauma which always seems to overwhelm the positive steps I try to take.
Don't leave your mind so open that your brain falls out. Don't close it so much that you cut off the blood.
Attaching electrodes to the genitals has also been shown to enhance recall in the subject.
I spoke to an associate professor that work with cognition some, and she talked about that humans are likely not meant to have very good memory. Humans process a lot of the stimuli they take in for a long time (don't know if that's the same as low latent inhibition, but maybe), and often, when eidetic memory is present in a person, they are pretty much screwed up somewhere else, she said. Look at this if you haven't seen it; chimps out-performing humans in memory tests: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TC1nJ61l-h4
Humans might not need very good memory since we have language. We evolved in large social groups of dozens to hundreds of individuals (now thousands). It's not necessary for every individual in the group to remember, for instance, when certain trees are producing fruit, or where the best hunting grounds are, or how you make a tool. As long as a few people in the community remember, you can just ask around. You're doing a search on your social network.
I can bet the name of the mouse in question is Algernon
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
The first is often a stumbling block for evolution. For humans living on the coast, having gills as well as lungs would be a significant advantage, because it would dramatically increase their ability to find food. Part of the problem with this is that evolution can only optimise for local maxima. The intervening stages for developing lungs or gils are quite beneficial for simple organisms as they increase the size that the creature can grow to, but they are problematic for organisms that already have a large degree of specialisation among cells.
The second is also a problem. Consider short sightedness. This has a significant evolutionary disadvantage, but individual characteristics are not selected for. If the gene happens to be on the same chromosome as one that carries an advantage (increased sperm count, higher intelligence, or whatever) then it will be selected for to a certain degree, but the disadvantage may mean that it will never spread through the entire population.
There is also the question of timescale. If you have a characteristic that is such an evolutionary advantage that it will always be selected for (i.e. any member of the species will always choose to mate with members of that phenotype in preference to any others) then it will still take thousands of years for it to spread to the entire human population.
Finally, remember that evolution only selects for things that are good for the species, not for individuals. The theory of evolution is a tautology: genes that are good at propagating themselves will propagate better than genes that are not good at propagating themselves. Consider rats. They have a very high mutation rate, which is good for the species because it makes them hard to poison: one rat in a population will probably have an immunity to whatever the poison is, and the next generation will all be immune. This sucks for individual rats though: the ones that aren't immune still die, and the ones that are die of cancer soon after.
Having the members of a species competing for resources after they've passed on their genes (and ensured the survival of their offspring for long enough to breed) is bad for a species, but I doubt many people in their 40s would consider that suicide is good for the individual...
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Harrison Bergeron was here.
Non-sequitur, and you need to re-read Vonnegut if you read it with Heinlein goggles and only saw the top story, and missed the satire. The joke is on people who have a skewed view of what socialism is.
Socialism isn't about "from each the same, to each the same", and that's the lie Vonnegut wanted to expose through this story.
Not allowing the rich to increase the opportunities of their offspring is in no way comparable to decreasing anyone's inherent chances in order to enforce equality.
In the case of augmentation, the question isn't who can afford it, nor who deserves it, but who needs it.
In my experience, the more people learn and grow in life, the less selfish they become.
Does that mean most political conservatives stopped leaning and growing when they were 15 or so? :)
With the first link, the chain is forged.
Here's the reason why we don't have perfect memory:http://scienceblogs.com/cortex/2008/12/hell_is_a_perfect_memory.php. Perfect memory is great when your job is to tell stories about events, but for every other situation, it's complete overkill with significant downsides. Your bio teacher was right, and he was right when it comes to perfect memory: perfect memory is a hindrance in the vast majority of situations you encounter in life. Do you want to perfectly remember every broken bone? Every disappointment? Every failure? Every disaster that has struck around you?
No. On the contrary, you want to be able to forget a lot of things, so that you can move on and try again.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.