Brain Prosthesis Ready For Testing 534
jhouserizer writes "New Scientist is reporting that an artificial hippocampus is ready to undergo testing. The leader of the team of scientists is Theodore Berger of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. They hope these artificial hippocampuses can replace damaged (stroke, Alzheimer's, etc.) portions of your brain. I wonder what portions of 'you' would be noticeably different to your family & friends? I wonder how long it will be before we can have HUDs, such as in this story by Cory Doctorow?"
Sweet! (Score:4, Funny)
You: I need a bubble sort.
Tank: Comin right up
* Eyes flutter *
You: Lets go!
Brain Implants (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Brain Implants (Score:5, Informative)
The reason it worked is that the doctors harvested muscular stem cells and implanted them in the heart, which is basically one big muscle. To do that with a brain, you will need to use neural stem cells. Interestingly, the most common place to get neural stem cells is from the hippocampal region.
Of course, implanting neural stem cells into a brain may have some unintended side effects. Who knows what changes in thought patterns might occur with completely fresh neurons in a brain?
Re:Brain Implants (Score:5, Insightful)
No need to wonder; look at how "fresh neurons" behave in real life. In other words, look at newborn babies. The answer is "not much".
Neural weights only really have meaning in highly specific contexts. Even if you could "copy & paste" neurons in your brain, the new location would render the neurons effectively noise, having no coherent effect, and thus having effectively no effect at all.
Again, you can partially see this in the real world. We've watch people's brains adapt to losing vision and going to sound for their primary input, converting vision brain area to sound brain area in the process. It's not magical; the old vision stuff is effectively useless and completely re-purposed. Cognitive-level concepts are far, far, far higher then neural weights. So the old neurons are effectively full of garbage.
That's the reason this is so impressive to me. We've more-or-less decoded how the ear transmits sound to the brain, and have devices that can do this now, albiet not quite as well as real ears yet. We've started with ocular implants, though I don't know if that uses direct ocular nerve stimulation. This is because there are reasonably rational patterns that the sense data is transmitted in.
But once you're inside the brain, the nerve impulses have no objective meaning. "Thought transmission", if it is ever acheived by technology, won't be as simple as replaying neural impulses from one brain into another; there's no one-to-one correspondence between neurons, and certainly no corresponence to neural weights. (Odds are, we'd have to learn to use it, and it would 'just another' line of communication, not 'mind reading' as it was portrayed in past literature. Of course, if too much information is transmitted skilled "telepaths" might still get more information then the sender intended, just as reading body language can tell you more then the speaker intended.)
To acheive any success with an internal brain structure, understood or otherwise, is (IMHO, this is subjective of course) orders of magnitude more interesting then the ocular implants, which were pretty impressive themselves.
Again, I emphasize: This isn't magic. This is droll reality. Out of context, a neuron is nearly useless.
Re:Brain Implants (Score:3, Interesting)
I think if we're going to have some sort of 'thought transmission', it'll be sort of a machine-assisted super language. You'd still need some kind of common frame of reference to start with, though. It makes my head hurt just trying to imagine where you'd start when trying to decode and quantify ideas directly from the brain.
What I'd like to see is a 'mind's eye' feedback device - something that can build a picture from what you see in your head, and display it for you, like on a computer screen. You could picture a face, or a scene, or whatever. If you're like me and not a gifted artist, it'd probably be pretty rough at first, but by looking at it you'd be able to say 'no, that's not right', and fix details one at a time. Like working with a police sketch artist, but in real time.
Re:Brain Implants (Score:4, Insightful)
Neither way has yet proved useful enough to deploy on a large scale. It is a little tougher than a cochlear implant, because you have to seal the device inside the eye, and provide a power source that can stimulate a bunch of microelectrodes.
Just because we don't understand something now doesn't mean it cannot be replicated in the future. There was a time, about 30 years ago, when simulating the function of the human ear was unheard of. Now, patients get cochlear implants and can understand speech. Artificial hearts are in use. The brain is a matter of time, the retina will come relatively quickly, next will be implants that couple motor cortex to external devices, there are already stimulating electrodes that modulate the motor system...
where we will be in 30 more years is pretty cool.
Re:Brain Implants (Score:4, Informative)
Re:New Neurons? (Score:3, Interesting)
Hippocampus... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Hippocampus... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Hippocampus... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Hippocampus... (Score:5, Informative)
easy (Score:5, Funny)
Re:easy (Score:2)
Neural Nets (Score:2, Interesting)
We can all upload our brains into Neural Net Hardware.
Scarrrry......
Re:Neural Nets - Getting into the machine (Score:4, Interesting)
What he meant by this, of course, was that if you were to copy an image of your brain into a computer, then the real 'you' would still be outside the machine, watching the image of you play with all the bells and whistles and fun things that their new digital life afforded them.
So, I would suggest the following:
1) nano-machines are placed into your brain, where they spread out and cradle every neuron.
2) as neurons die (old age, etc) the nano-machine become active, and emulate the neurons that they're cradling. These would be the Type I nano-machines.
3) eventually, you have a completely robotic brain, devoid of biological tissue, but the structure of the brain still encodes it's function, so... how do we 'upload' without having the problem of two copies of you?
4) the nano-machines are slowly replaced by a different kind of nano-machine... one that can only act as a transmitter/receiver of information, and cannot do any computation itself. These type II machines offload the processing that they would have to do to a computer outside your body, and as more and more type II's are introduced, more and more of the computing takes place outside of 'you'... now it's easy to see how 'you' could get into the machine...
And that's that. Of course, some would suggest the following:
1) make copy of person's brain in a computer
2) kill the person
But would that really transfer 'you' - your consciousness, and the perception of self? Or would it just be an emulation that thinks it's you?
I don't know. Neither does Kurzweil, as far as I can remember.
(Apologies to Mr. Kurzweil if I've misquoted or otherwise screwed up your ideas - it's been a while since I've read your work)
Re:Neural Nets - Getting into the machine (Score:2, Interesting)
I think it would be you. Think of it this way: if the emulation is good enough so that no observer can distinguish between the original and the emulation, then that person has been transferred.
There's no reason to believe that the person being emulated is any more qualified an observer than anyone else. If it's good enough to fool outside observers, it's good enough to fool the person being emulated.
Re:Neural Nets - Getting into the machine (Score:5, Interesting)
That's metaphysics; you are presupposing the existence of consciousness independent of a physical medium.
At present, there is no evidence to support (or refute) your hypothesis.
It's just as possible that consciousness is an epiphenomenon of chemical activity in a special configuration of neurons known as a "brain" - in much the same way that "Pac-Man" is an epiphenomenon of certain electrical impulses in special configuration of silicon known as a "Z80 CPU and EPROMs", or "P4 2.4GHz, hard drive, and MAME".
If the materialist viewpoint is the case, and the copy is destructive, then yes, one of me experiences death. And one of me experiences a lifetime before transfer to machine, followed by an odd transitional moment (which may not be "experienced" per se -- can a machine actually be said to be "running" code in the nanoseconds between clock cycles?), followed by life as a machine.
More interestingly, if the copying process is nondestructive, one of me experiences being the aforementioned weird transition from "running on meat" to "running on silicon", and the original experiences nothing worse than having some kind of funky scanner waved over me.
I'd like to run on silicon. fork() me a few times, plug my copies into space probes, and lob them off on random paths to star systems, and HLT me until there are enough photons bouncing off my solar panels to run my clock. It may take 500,000 years to go from star system to star system, but who cares? I cease to exist for half a million years at a time, but those are the boring parts of the trip anyways. Finally, I could see the galaxy on five Altarian dollars a day!
Re:Neural Nets - Getting into the machine (Score:3, Interesting)
I think his point is that the AI would have *a* spirit/soul/whatever; it just wouldn't be *your* spirit/soul/whatever. It's effectively a brand new and entirely seperate entity from you.
You make a perfect virtual copy of yourself. The copy is happy and immortal and everything, but *you* are still stuck in your body. *You* haven't gone anywhere. You've just been photocopied. Something nearly indentical to you would be immmortal, but *you* wouldn't and you'd eventually die. Which defeats the purpose of the whole exercise.
The best way to keep *you* going would be the gradual replacement that others suggested.
Re:Neural Nets - Getting into the machine (Score:3, Interesting)
If that's true, that means that both the 'you' inside your brain and the 'you' inside the computer in the 'copy and kill' method would both really be you. Both have memories, emotions, and preferences of the original. It would be unethical and immoral at that point to destroy either one.
Cool (Score:2, Interesting)
Most people would waste a brain extension. Any expansion in intellectual power must be preceded by an expansion in social capacity for learning.
Burn their playhouse down! (Score:5, Funny)
foreheads on their real heads o/`
Record your life? (Score:3, Interesting)
So lets say they get this working. Would it then be possible to record every moment of your life and store it away?
Re:Record your life? (Score:2)
[joking, if they can do this, they can certainly just re-route the inputs 'unencoded' elsewhere I'd assume]
Re:Record your life? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Record your life? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Record your life? (Score:2)
If this device is simply taking input, processing it in a very specific way, then outputting it surely it would be possible to record the input and then play it back.
Reminds me of that movie Strange Days a bit.
Although I don't think it would record your perceptions but rather whatever you were remembering right then.
Re:Record your life? (Score:2)
This is only about RECORDING memories at this point. So replaying a recording would
Re:Record your life? (Score:3, Funny)
Only if you sign a document giving the hospital exclusive copyrights, including movies, books, broadway plays, performance rights and derivitives. Any attempt to circumvent your brain prosthesis would then been construed as a voilation of the DMCA.
Re:Record your life? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Record your life? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Record your life? (Score:5, Funny)
Hmmm... Remember Sammy Jenkis?
Re:Record your life? (Score:2, Interesting)
Connections to Memento? Methinks so.
Re:Record your life? (Score:5, Funny)
No.
Re:Record your life? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Record your life? (Score:2)
Re:Record your life? (Score:2)
Re:Record your life? (Score:3, Interesting)
In computer terms, the hippocampus would be the CPU issuing DMA requests; the data actually goes from RAM (short-term memory) to disk (long-term memory), without appearing in the output of the CPU. Recording the output of the CPU gives you all of the disk and RAM addresses, but not the actual data or the meanings of the addresses.
This project doesn't attempt to understand how the hippocampus works, or even what its exact role in memory is (beyond the fact that, whatever is does, it is necessary to memory work); it attempts to duplicate the signals the normal hippocampus produces. For all we know, the hippocampus might be an incredibly complex clock, needed for memory but having no useful relationship to the experiences you're having.
Re:Record your life? (Score:5, Informative)
Anyway, when I first saw this headline I was thrilled at the prospect of scientists anywhere actually understanding any chunk of brain well enough to replace it (with a semiconductor, no less -- those must be some awesome I/O buffers on that ASIC -- what's brain voltage, uV? nV?).
Then I saw:
They just brute-forced it! This is remarkable achievement, but moreso from tech implementation standpoint than a brain understanding standpoint.
The point is, we don't have any clue at all about the uber-divx format that encodes human perception or memory. So the idea of storing it outside of the brain (or even viewing it, or cross-connecting 2 brains) is kinda silly at our level of understanding.
We just found a little chunk (the hippocampus) that is essential to storing memories and happens to get whacked often enough by stroke and such. Then we did an all-possible-input-combos test on this chunk (using rat brains, apparently), recorded the outputs, and burned the whole thing into a look-up table in a chip, and (this is the cool part) connected the chip to a real brain, bypassing a broken hippocampus chunk.
We just mimicked a relatively simple part of the brain with an exhaustive, brute-force approach that may not scale well to human hippocampi.
Re:your .sig (Score:3, Interesting)
10 PRINTCHR$(147)
11 rem store old values
12 A=PEEK 53281:B=PEEK 53280:C=PEEK 646
15 rem set screen to black
20 POKE 53281,0:POKE 53280,0:POKE 646,0
25 rem check for keypress
30 GET A$:IF A$="" GOTO 30
35 rem restore old values
40 POKE 53281,A:POKE 53280,B: POKE 646,C
45 rem retun key pressed just for the heck of it.
50 PRINT"You pressed";A$;" to get your screen back!"
I'm not sure about the syntax of the PEEK command nor about the PRINT statement on line 50. As you can probably see, this 'screensaver' has been through some editing during previous discussions about it. Funny how so many people respond to my sig! Originally it just started out as 53281,0 and 53280,0 to create some quick black. Sadly the BASIC program is too long for my sig. Oh, and I as yet refuse to create a full-blown subroutine using GOSUB/RETURN just for to check for a pressed key but you're welcome to submit a patch and add features.. the thing is GPL'ed but adding the GPL in REM statements seemed a bit over the top
The first guy who uses the phrase... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:The first guy who uses the phrase... (Score:2)
Imagine a beowulf cluster of artificial hippocampuses.
Re:The first guy who uses the phrase... (Score:2)
Nope. When the phrase was used, the rules were not defined. Nice try.
Got my new brain today. (Score:5, Funny)
The big question... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:The big question... (Score:3, Funny)
Beer.
Geek Code! (Score:3, Funny)
(But you'll have to get in line behind me!)
Arizona State is a hypocampus... (Score:4, Funny)
*was that out loud?*
Oh swell.. (Score:2, Funny)
I wonder how long it will be before we can have HUDs
That would be wonderful. Script kiddie h4x0r5 your in-brain HUD and makes it so all you can see is the goatse.cx guy. [goatse.cx] No thanks, I'll keep my HUDless brain.
Really necessary? (Score:2)
Remembering is surely important also? (Score:2)
Okay, it might be handy, but the MOST beneficial process we possess? I think REMEMBERING might rank up there somewhere.
Adaptation (Score:5, Interesting)
I am very interested in seeing how the brain would adapt to this. Would the brain always remember things or, in the case of trauma, learn to halt impulses before they reach the implanted area so that they are "forgotten"?
Re:Adaptation (Score:5, Insightful)
Geek Translation (Score:5, Funny)
In other words, this device is to the hippocampus (a part of your brain involved in encoding data for storage) what Samba is to Windows....
Re:Adaptation (Score:3, Funny)
rm *nightwithfatchick
Re:Adaptation (Score:3, Interesting)
Consider a relational database, like Sybase. It maintains two types of data: the database itself, which analogous to what you know, and the transaction log, which is the experiences that taught you what you know. Example: you know not to touch a hot iron, because you had the experience of
FINALLY NO PH33R FROM B33R ! (Score:2)
Hell, I bet I can sit as close to the T.V. as my heart desires too !
Cool Quote (Score:2, Insightful)
Donovan't Brain (Score:2)
Thanks
WHo was the programmer on this brian project? (Score:2, Funny)
War stories.. (Score:5, Funny)
*taps prostetic leg*"I lost my leg in Korea.."
*taps head* "I lost my brain voting for Bush.."
I have a feeling this will be modded down.. heh.
Re:War stories.. (Score:2)
Hah! (Score:2)
You ever see that ?!
HAH! Talk about Art Imitating Life! Thats crazy!
Ethics? (Score:4, Informative)
Isn't that why we have 'power of attorney'? When you're of sound mind, you appoint someone that you can trust to look out for *your* best interest(s).
Case closed in my books...
Re:Ethics? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Ethics? (Score:3, Insightful)
As a person in that situation (my wife had a stroke 3 years ago that left her with communication/cognition difficulties) I'd be willing to see what something like this would do, and given the choice of "would you like to be like you were before" I'm fairly certain she would agree. I'm not sure what would qualify as "living well otherwise" with some forms of brain damage.
Unfortunatly, things like this are still a long way off, but here's hoping.
Doctorow, again? (Score:2)
For crying out loud, reaction here to his stories ranges from apathetic to appalled. Isn't there some other writer Slashdot could pimp incessantly?
Me, I want a HUD like Bud had in this book [amazon.com].
artificial intelligence? (Score:5, Interesting)
So, we proposed an experiment. Let's say you took a guy who had completely lost function in a very small, localized area of the brain, and built a machine capable of reproducing its function entirely. You stuck it inside the guy's head, and he was magically fixed.
Now, make the area affected progressively larger - lets say, by replacing the whole hippocampus. Or the entire left hemisphere of the brain. Or, what the hell, the whole thing. At what point do you say that it's no longer a mind, and is "just" a machine?
So, that's the first thing I thought of when I saw this story. Once we can perfectly replicate the functionality of every last bit of the brain, do we just have a really nifty toy, or a genuine mind?
Re:artificial intelligence? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:artificial intelligence? (Score:5, Insightful)
I remember those kinds of debates, and it always seemed to me that people got very hung up on the idea that only human experiences count for anything. There was this assumption that AI's goal is to become human is the sense that it actually experiences mental states identical to those of humans. But - what's wrong with having sophisticated mental states that aren't human mental states?
It will be really interesting once this sort of prostetic brain surgery happens - to be able to interview the patients and see if they really feel as if their mental states are different as a result of the new "tissue".
Re:artificial intelligence? (Score:2, Informative)
There was a "strong anti-AI" camp which believed that Artificial Intelligence couldn't happen - even if you created a perfect simulation of a brain, you'd just be "simulating" intelligence, whatever that means [...] Once we can perfectly replicate the functionality of every last bit of the brain, do we just have a really nifty toy, or a genuine mind?
I am not an AI expert, but I think that the main difference between the mind and the AI is that random, uncontrolled processes are incorporated in your thoughts, which is not the case for AI (unless this random component is simulated?) The encoding in your brain works like lossy compression.
This is the basis for the generation of imaginatory processes and the fact you can't recall a picture with the precision of a computer.
Re:artificial intelligence? (Score:2, Insightful)
I agree it acts exactly like a mind would, but it's not a mind.
I've seen the cams and pistons and bore and stroke and valves and shafts and spark plugs, coils, compression, explosion, expansion etc. I agree it acts like an internal combustion engine, but how do I know it's an actual internal combustion engine, and not just acting like one?
The point being, we judge our own mind solely by how it acts, depite knowing it's just simple electrical impules and synaptical thresholds, so we can only just an artificial mind on the same basis.
A good book that adresses all these issues (not as much with AI, but with mind) is "The Minds I", by Douglas Hofstadter and Danial C Dennett.
Re:artificial intelligence? (Score:2)
Why emphasis on disabled ? (Score:2, Interesting)
But in the end there is no debate. Those who stand in the way of progress will be killed by the products of progress (implanted guass rifles). Those who make the disabled normal will be killed by those who make the normal something more.
brain prosthesis? (Score:2)
As a Texas Liberal, you can imagine who one of my first choices for leaders-needing-more-than-room-temperature-IQs is.
Oh great (Score:3, Funny)
Dupe? (Score:2, Funny)
And I thought duplicate stories on
Mandatory Singularity Panic Post... (Score:3, Funny)
This is cool. (Score:5, Funny)
This post is serious. Don't laugh.
Different portions of 'you" (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't think the word should be "different", but "better". Things like Alzheimer's can be disastrous to your family. You disappear, and a completely different, and usually unwanted, person is the replacement. It's a horrible disease.
ethical questions... (Score:2, Insightful)
- the hippocampus is a black box (they can't even see the "object code," if you will
- complex systems are notoriously difficult to debug
I find the claim that the scientists have considered every possible behavior and simulated it in firmware to be suspect.
How can they be sure they have considered every possible input/output? How can they be sure that what they observed was "correct" behavior?
Any biologists or neuroscientists care to elucidate? Also, how similar is the human hippocampus to the rat's? Couldn't the behavior differences require complete regression testing? It seems like this increase in precision in medicine demands a commensurate increase in the precision of testing.
Just in time! (Score:2)
Who was I trying to call on this phone I picked up? What did I walk down to the basement for? Who put this pizza crust in my mouth? Why is the mouse pointer hovering over the submit button? Screw it. Just chew and click the damn button.
Why would you want a new hippocampus? (Score:5, Funny)
The hippocampus integrates short-term memory into long-term. People who have had their hippocampus damaged (or removed) are unable to form any new long-term memories. They live incredibly interesting lives, because everyone they meet is a new person - every time they meet them. Why would you want to actually have yours replaced?
I told my wife that if I had my hippocampus removed, I'd get to sleep with a new woman every night, and not even be cheating on her! She didn't appreciate the comment so much, though....
steve
Re:Why would you want a new hippocampus? (Score:5, Funny)
Forgive me if I seem skeptical... (Score:2, Interesting)
how the heart works in detail. Treating the hippocampus like a "black
box" will probably not work. This just begs the question of how the
brain works, which we still don't know. I would never let someone
open up my skull and implant something if they couldn't explain how
and why it works. Sorry but this is not news, just some promising
research combined with wishful thinking.
Once and for all (Score:3, Informative)
and
Hippopotamii is not the plural of hippopotamus.
Just want to head that one off at the pass.
Re:Once and for all (Score:3, Informative)
Hippopotamus's [reference.com] plural can be either hippopotami or hippopotamuses.
how much is different already? (Score:2)
what all goes into the hippocampus? is your personality in there or just the bits that make it possible to remember where your keys are? if you have alzheimer's you're already a different person than your kids or spouse remember from a few years prior.
High hopes (Score:5, Interesting)
Of course, I want one, and I want to mod it. Record an encoding of a lecture, and play it back on the train ride home. Or do a 2 second loop of someone while they say their name, in order to remember those bloody things (why can't people just e-mail their names to my phone?). Or, as in the case of Daredevil, put an encoding on hold until the end of a film in order to know if it is worth wasting space on.
I can't wait until I get Alzheimers just to try this out! Fortuitously, that will be about the same time this chip comes out of beta.
Re:High hopes (Score:5, Insightful)
This could be a boon for training. Imagine being able to pull down a file from the net, jacking into a usb port, and after a while, being able to speak chinese. Or have an intimate knowlege of physics. Wow.
On the other hand, it would make the term "knowledge transfer" more insidious. Law enforcement would love this. Suspicious spouses too. Having an interface like this would end the last private place in your existence: your own head.
But this is only just come out of it's conceptual stage. It'll be interesting to see where the technology takes it.
Greg Egan... (Score:3, Interesting)
Yet again, the real world imitates one of his stories. He has a couple of stories based in a world where everyone's brain is swapped out for a crystal computer. Mindfuck stuff about the true seat of consciousness, mortality and the meaning of "human". Just remembered "Reasons to be cheerful", specifically about brain prosthesics and personality.
Home page with free stories [netspace.net.au]
This is my third Greg Egan post in the last few months and they've all been ontopic. He thinks big thoughts about our near future and is a much better writer than Cory Doctorow, imho.
Already got one. (Score:5, Funny)
These things are great. I just had one installed yesterday.
These things are great. I just had one installed yesterday.
These things are great. I just had one installed yesterday.
These things are great. I just had one installed yesterday.
I can see the spam now (Score:3, Funny)
Subject: Brain Enlargement!?!
Yes with our patented technique you can increase your I.Q. by at least 40 points!?! I myself didn't believe it when I first heard of this technique! But it works!!! (ad nauseum)...
Maybe they can somehow bootleg this into those Nigerian money scams.
Familiar method (Score:5, Interesting)
No one understands how the hippocampus encodes information. So the team simply copied its behaviour. Slices of rat hippocampus were stimulated with electrical signals, millions of times over, until they could be sure which electrical input produces a corresponding output. Putting the information from various slices together gave the team a mathematical model of the entire hippocampus.
I suppose it's nice they were careful to avoid infringing on the brain's IP. (Or should that be The Brain's IP; I imagine he has a number of patents under his evil little belt.)
I just want (Score:5, Funny)
2+2? 5, of course. Dammit, I got an Intel.
DRM (Score:5, Funny)
it's not a black box to me... (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.princeton.edu/~psych/PsychSite/compm
then click on the first article under "Review Papers". You can follow the references to find other, relevant papers. Also, I should say that I am extremely skeptical that the prosthesis described in the New Scientist article will be able to substitue for an actual hippocampus. One of the key properties of the hippocampus (and the brain more generally) is that it *changes* as a function of experience --- every time you store a new memory in the hippocampus, it changes the strengths of synapses, which in turn changes the input-output function. So I can't see how it would be possible to replace the hippocampus using a simple, static lookup table. I may be missing something, but I think we are still a very long way from building an artificial hippocampus, and I think that we won't be successful in this endeavor unless we build in some knowledge about how the structure actually works...
Re:it's not a black box to me... (Score:3, Informative)
You'd be far, far better equipped than I to review their work (having just read the N
Re:it's not a black box to me... (Score:3, Informative)
What gets the average Joe into trouble is the fact the very few systems in this world are linear, and those that are assume that its working in a very specific environment. The feed us all of these contrived examples in school, and people graduate expecting the world to behave according to the rules of algebra. Well, it doesn't.
As it turns out, what we learn in physics really only appli
Brain upgrade (Score:5, Funny)
I wonder what portions of 'you' would be noticeably different to your family & friends?
Probably your hippocampus. Do they offer an optional skull-window or perhaps some neon or colored cables?