Brain Power Boosted With Electrical Stimulation 153
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."
Quick! (Score:2)
BOOST ALL THE BRAINS!
Seriously. There's elections coming up.
Not just the brains. (Score:3, Funny)
Attaching electrodes to the genitals has also been shown to enhance recall in the subject.
This is a lot more complicated... (Score:2)
Well, I know that people with really hot tempers usually have bad memories. They'd not be able to live with anyone else, or probably themselves, if they didn't.
I think that what we really want is really selective memory. Like for rapid learning of languages.
If you just want to remember facts, there are some memory tricks that work pretty well. Oops, I've forgotten the links :-)
Re:This is a lot more complicated... (Score:5, Insightful)
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."
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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 ... As my old bio teacher used to intone, "evolution proceeds towards what works, not what's best."
Intelligent design has nothing to do with it. Your assertion is that we don't have capabilities like this because we haven't needed them enough yet? Isn't it possible that such things (like being able to go without oxygen for a long time) would involve too significant a cost for the rare cases it would be needed and therefore is not worth the tradeoff?
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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 f
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Actually, evolution only selects for things that are good for the individual. The species can go hang. This is the reason for many problems.
N.B., however, that the individual in question is the "gene". This often promotes kin-group altruism. But it also quite often translates into the individual body, as a gene has no guaranteed way of recognizing another body as being host to the same gene.
Caution should be used in reading the previous text. If read incautiously they could be taken as implying intent
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"evolution only selects for things that are good for the individual."
False.
Why have evolved the ability to put the 'group' ahead of ourselves.
We have evolved to work together.
People who take care of the species are more likely to survive because the specious will take care of them. Extremely strong survival trait when its applies to children. Meaning people who have this trait will take care of other children and visa versa. This means a higher likely hood of the gens moving on.
I am not intending to imply e
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Why have evolved the ability to put the 'group' ahead of ourselves.
We haven't. We are, however, dependent on the social matrix for our survival, so we tend to support that. And during much of our evolutionary history most of our social matrix consisted of close relatives, so they had a large number of genes in common with us. Thus genes supporting the social matrix gained survival probability even at the cost of their current body. But this is an iffy proposition, so we don't have any strong tendency i
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Intelligent design has nothing to do with it. Your assertion is that we don't have capabilities like this because we haven't needed them enough yet?
No, not at all. We don't have those capabilities because humans survive without them.
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The assertion is that we don't have such capabilities either because mutations to that effect did not randomly happen (oxygen-less survival) or because they d
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The entity is called "natural selection" .... There's no such thing as a free lunch, so the cost (in extra food input) of maintaining extra neurons or what have you just to remember what kind of sandwich you had 823 days ago is not worth it. And by "not worth it", I mean that in the competition between a hypothetical species with the trait and one without the trait, the one without the trait will more easily survive, breed, and conquer.
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Until 100 years ago, true. But as more and more intelligence is needed for survival within society, smarts will be selected for by a mate more often.
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Here's the reason why we don't have perfect memory:http://scienceblogs.com/cortex/2008/12/hell_is_a_perfect_memory.php [scienceblogs.com]. 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
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Don't confuse memory with emotional experience.
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That's the thing - emotional experience doesn't exist without memory.
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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 [youtube.com]
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.
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But as far as I know the statistics show that the reproduction nowadays rate of humans is rather reciprocal than proportional to success (assumed that you take success in jobs, political success etc. as the metric for success). This might give evolution a hard time to help us here :-)
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It's also clear that a brain with perfect memory is physically impossible
Why is that obvious? My DVR has a perfect memory of its sensory inputs, why couldn't a brain (in theory) do the same?
Granted it would probably need to be much larger (and/or more space-efficient), or have lower-resolution sensory inputs, or both, but I don't see any fundamental reason why it would be physically impossible.
The obvious reason why it hasn't occurred (or at least hasn't occurred yet) is that our existing memory system is "good enough" from a survival/reproduction perspective.
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And who would "change tape" in your brain when it's full?
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Sheesh, slashdot really is slipping these days...
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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 mor
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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
Re:This is a lot more complicated... (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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I also have exceptional memory but it's on the decline with age. However I would like to give you an advice. Don't dwell on the sad / embarrassing details. They are the past and unchangeable. Your remembering and not remembering them does not change the fact that your kitten is dead because you exercised your arm too much. The next time you find yourself dwelling on these shitty memories, go live life a little bit more. Clean the house, fix a car, help an old lady, load starcraft, make pancakes.
New mem
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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 bodie
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I don't know if a piece of my experience can provide some insight but your "not going out much" rang a bell. Most of my friends find me weird that I remember things so vividly that if they weren't my friends, they'd think I am some godlike bullshitter like Kevin Spacey in The Usual Suspects. Only a few people in the world knows the truth, those being my closest friends. And I don't mind sharing it with you here as nobody reads past the grandchild of any slashdot post lol.
The truth, why I think I remember
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Imagine constantly reliving your most painful or embarrassing moments.
What painful or embarrassing moments? You might feel that way, but what is painful or embarrassing to you isn't necessarily painful or embarrassing to someone else. There's no reason that I see to be upset over a memory. There's likely nothing you can do to change it, so there's no point. For people that don't care, I don't think that remembering moments that would be painful or embarrassing to a normal person would matter. Or perhaps someone sees it as a good trade off.
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You might feel that way, but what is painful or embarrassing to you isn't necessarily painful or embarrassing to someone else. There's no reason that I see to be upset over a memory. There's likely nothing you can do to change it, so there's no point. For people that don't care, I don't think that remembering moments that would be painful or embarrassing to a normal person would matter.
First of all, if someone has no emotional connection to their memories, there is something wrong with their brain... the limbic system tags memories, connecting them with the emotions we felt while experiencing them, which helps us to relieve them and to trigger anticipations of future similar circumstances. Secondly, two people will see the same incident in different ways - what may be a painful embarrassment for one may be completely unnotable for another. The type of memories I'm talking about are the on
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there is something wrong with their brain
I disagree. I think it would be a positive thing. Well, certainly, they'd be somewhat different.
There's no point in regret that I see. It changes nothing. Feeling sad or angry changes nothing. Maybe some people would have trouble just not caring, but I think others wouldn't.
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Remorse/regret is a very useful tool, in that it will help us prevent doing harmful things again in the future. Someone without a feeling of remorse will likely do whatever benefits them in the moment without care for the consequences of that action.
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Remorse/regret is a very useful tool, in that it will help us prevent doing harmful things again in the future.
If doing something will likely cause you to be harmed in some way (not emotionally), then neither remorse or regret is necessary for someone to avoid it. They know what will likely happen, so they avoid it. Emotions aren't necessary to realize that much.
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However, it only takes one more step for the emotionless to go from "well, I can get away with it because it isn't illegal" to "well, I'm so much smarter/more powerful than everyone else that I'll get away with
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However, it only takes one more step for the emotionless to go from "well, I can get away with it because it isn't illegal" to "well, I'm so much smarter/more powerful than everyone else that I'll get away with it even if it is illegal."
That could be said about anyone (even people who have emotions). Those who have normal emotions still commit crimes (some feel justified, others feel they need to). Honestly, I don't think they're very intelligent if they think they can get away with it so easily (especially if others failed many times), so they're not much different from normal criminals. Like with normal people, it depends on the person (or sociopath).
And not feeling emotion towards past events probably doesn't ensure someone is a sociopa
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Therefore, you avoid a lot of nasty/bad behaviour because you know you will regret it.
But nasty and bad are both subjective. And if it isn't already illegal, then I probably don't care about it.
Except that society would fall apart if everybody did that.
That's why we have laws. That's where the "harm" comes from. There doesn't need to be any emotion involved to create laws. All there needs to be is a consensus that it would benefit society in the end.
And people with emotions commit crimes all the time. Oftentimes because of those emotions. The fact that someone doesn't feel regret (or doesn't feel much of it) won't necessarily make them commit a crim
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Everyone has painful and/or embarrassing things in their lives, it's part of the human condition. Yours don't bother you much because not dwelling on such things causes them to fade in your memory, unless, of course, your memory is enhanced.
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Everyone has painful and/or embarrassing things in their lives
Can you prove that? That's an interesting thing to claim because not only did you probably not ask everyone this, but even if you did, how could you be sure (or even close to sure) that you are right? I doubt you can read minds.
Yours don't bother you much because not dwelling on such things causes them to fade in your memory
What if you remember things that would normally embarrass/emotionally scar a "normal" person but feel absolutely nothing from it?
I merely want to find out why this isn't possible.
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Can you prove that? That's an interesting thing to claim because not only did you probably not ask everyone this, but even if you did, how could you be sure (or even close to sure) that you are right? I doubt you can read minds.
WOW, Really?!? Look around a bit, read some good literature. Read some Shakespeare. It's only been a matter of common knowledge since the dawn of written language. I have to wonder what's broken in your brain for you to have not noticed this.
What if you remember things that would normally embarrass/emotionally scar a "normal" person but feel absolutely nothing from it?
As for why it isn't possible, I didn't say that, I just said it doesn't happen normally (using a standard term "everybody" in the in the non-literal sense). It is possible if there is a bit of missing brain in the limbic system, but there's good reason to believe that
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I have to wonder what's broken in your brain for you to have not noticed this.
What have I failed to notice? What does "common knowledge" have to do with anything?
using a standard term "everybody" in the in the non-literal sense
I see.
If you can't be emotionally hurt
What if someone could be emotionally hurt, but not by mere memories?
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What if someone could be emotionally hurt, but not by mere memories?
Then they would likely commit all manner of atrocities large and small because they would get no visceral sense of wrong. Then as soon as the event was over they would remember no sense of wrong.
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Then they would likely commit all manner of atrocities large and small because they would get no visceral sense of wrong.
Well, "wrong" is subjective to begin with. The fact that someone doesn't feel emotions does not mean they will go out and commit "atrocities." Even people without emotions (or regret) have brains and can work out the consequences of their actions (breaking the law could get them arrested and their actions could hurt society).
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Hurting society is irrelevant to the sociopath. Most have a hard time consistently applying the rules about breaking the law and being punished. They tend to spend a lot of time incarcerated. The few brighter ones do manage that bit, but tend to abuse people in other not quite provably illegal but certainly immoral and unethical ways whenever it benefits them in the slightest.
Sociopaths are noted as well for having only shallow and primitive emotions. I would question how well emotional development could oc
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Hurting society is irrelevant to the sociopath.
What if relevant or irrelevant for them is for them to determine. Perhaps they can use their brains and determine the consequences of what would happen if everyone did the same thing. Their brains don't turn to mush (as far as I know). Emotions aren't necessary to determine what will likely happen if you do something.
certainly immoral and unethical
Since it is easily possible for someone to have a different idea of what is "immoral," then the same could be said about anyone.
Most have a hard time consistently applying the rules about breaking the law and being punished.
"Most"? I wonder if "most" sociopaths have even been found.
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What if relevant or irrelevant for them is for them to determine.
What if rattlesnake venom cured cancer and no means sunset orange now? All of those things require some feeling of connection to others (an emotional response) and the sociopath simply doesn't have it. When you open a bag of chips, do you stop for a moment to consider how the bag might feel about it?
Since it is easily possible for someone to have a different idea of what is "immoral," then the same could be said about anyone.
So when the girls scouts knock at the psycho's door and he hacksaws their heads off to use as planters he's just being "differently moral" and we should respect that? Sorry, no. Sometimes wrong is wrong.
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All of those things require some feeling of connection to others
Thinking about how you will probably end up in prison requires a feeling of connection to others?
So when the girls scouts knock at the psycho's door and he hacksaws their heads off to use as planters he's just being "differently moral" and we should respect that?
Straw man. I didn't say that everyone should respect everyone else's morals. I don't believe that morals are absolute.
But my real point wasn't about whether morals were absolute or not. It was about the fact that since different people can have different moral codes, someone could do something to someone else that you find "immoral." Them being a sociopath (or something similar) has little to do with it.
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Straw man. I didn't say that everyone should respect everyone else's morals. I don't believe that morals are absolute.
You either accept that SOME things are absolute even for morals or my characterization is not a straw man. Pick one please.
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What are you talking about? I never said that you have to respect someone else's morals even if they have them. For instance, you can have your own morals and act against those who you believe are doing "wrong." Nothing about moral relativism states otherwise. All that is required is believing that morals are subjective. You don't have to "respect" anything.
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I was attempting to politely shut down the red herring you introduced. You made the claim that morals are relative, and I challenged that SOME aspects are not negotiable, there do exist absolute wrongs.
I then provided as an example something that anyone who actually has a sense of morals could clearly understand to be an absolute wrong.
However, since this seems to have primarily become an argument where you really really want to have part of your limbic system disabled so you can have your memory enhanced w
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there do exist absolute wrongs.
Who decides this? How? How can we trust the one who decides? Do you have proof of this?
just stay away from me or anyone I care about after and don't blame me if you end up strapped into old sparky.
Well, I'm sure my brain wouldn't be turned to mush and I could still consider the consequences (prison) of my actions.
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Who decides this? How? How can we trust the one who decides? Do you have proof of this?
Let's turn it around. When would hacksawing the heads off of Girl Scouts and using them as planters NOT be wrong? If it is not an absolute wrong, when is it right? If it is an absolute wrong, then I submit to you that there are absolute wrongs.
Well, I'm sure my brain wouldn't be turned to mush and I could still consider the consequences (prison) of my actions.
Oh great, that's just what we need, "Chainsaw" Al Dunlap jr. abusing people everywhere he goes taking advantage of a world that has forgotten that some people have richly earned a punch in the nose.
So anyway, like I said, go ahead and have the surgery then, just stay
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Let's turn it around. When would hacksawing the heads off of Girl Scouts and using them as planters NOT be wrong?
It would not be universally wrong if someone thought it wasn't wrong and moral absolutes didn't exist.
So anyway, like I said, go ahead and have the surgery then, just stay away from me and mine because you'll have made a monster of yourself.
But I don't think that you actually demonstrated that people that don't have emotions (or lack certain ones) don't want to avoid getting hurt themselves (prison, etc).
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It would not be universally wrong if someone thought it wasn't wrong and moral absolutes didn't exist.
And if wishes were horses, everyone would ride! You didn't answer the question. When is it OK? Would you let any person who can even conceive of a time when it would be OK anywhere near anyone you love?
But I don't think that you actually demonstrated that people that don't have emotions (or lack certain ones) don't want to avoid getting hurt themselves (prison, etc).
I never tried to demonstrate that! Of course they want to avoid harm to themselves, that's what they're all about. Some are bad at it and go to prison. Others become the real monsters, leaving a long trail of hurt people in their wake with little to prove actual criminality and enough well groomed accomplices
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When is it OK?
Universally right? "Right" and "wrong" are just opinions to moral relativists.
Would you let any person who can even conceive of a time when it would be OK anywhere near anyone you love?
No. But what does that have to do with moral relativism.
Some are bad at it and go to prison.
And some (who knows how many) don't do anything. Just like some people with those emotions don't do anything.
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No. But what does that have to do with moral relativism.
It shows that in it's "absolute" form, it's bankrupt. The weaker statement that many morals are relative may have legs.
And some (who knows how many) don't do anything
Name one.
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Wow, some self diagnosis themselves to have something they want to have. No bias there.
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My sister is flat out evil and sp
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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 [wikipedia.org].
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The standard answers to this kind of question are:
1. Local optimum: Evolution is a black box optimization process. No black box optimization process that progresses in reasonable time can cover all of the search space, so they will get stuck in local optima. The eye is a good example of a local optimum. The nerve fibers are on the wrong side of the eye, so you get a large blind spot where the fibers go "out of t
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Do you recall? (Score:2)
Too bad a good memory (Score:2)
Didn't we have this news item before? (Score:2)
Ben..... (Score:2)
Stimulated cell growth. (Score:2)
I know something else that stimulates cell growth.
Cancer.
Google and Friends (Score:2)
Algernon (Score:3)
I can bet the name of the mouse in question is Algernon
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. . . unimaginative lab assistant.
hrmmm (Score:2)
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In all seriousness I'd recommend a physical. Noticeable memory loss is an early sign of heart disease.
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Krell (Score:2)
Crikey the Krell have been doing this for millenia, You guys need to get out more.
Ringworld (Score:2)
While they are putting the wiring in how about one into the pleasure center -- then we can have a new group of addicts called Wire Heads. Cheap since it only takes a bit of electricity.
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Aaaaaahhhhhhhhh Yeeeaaaaaaahhhhhhh!
Forced Exercise? (Score:2)
I know that exercise helps brain function but shocking somebody in the head with an electrical probe isn't a very nice way to motivate someone.
BB for the win (Score:2)
So that's what Dr. Lizardo was doing.
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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,
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You forgot Poland.
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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 augm
Re:Augmentation (Score:5, Insightful)
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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? :)
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I don't know that you would have the problem you're referring to, being unable to distinguish from every instance of having parked your car in the parking lot. If you had perfect recall, surely you would begin to record EVERY detail of every instance and then when attempting to recall today's specific instance, I imagine your brain's capability for pattern recognition would sort through the most relevant results to pull up the correct one. We do that all the time really. There are any number of things which
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The more rich people who use it the more the price will go down as the market demands it.
Look at HDTVs, I was using a tube TV and only rich people had them 10 years ago, but now even the "poor" have HDTVs.
Same with computers, poor people used to not beable to afford a new PC, now they are so cheap and laptops are so ubliquitous that the 5,000 laptop from 1990 is now 350 dollars and 100 times as powerful. And you count inflation in there and the 350 dollar laptop adjusts to around 150 dollars.
Need I even g
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Would you be saying the same thing about LASIK eye surgery 15 yars ago? Which used to be ultra expensive, but now you can get it done in for less than 500 per eye in a strip mall?
Very bad example. Laser vision correction was done in other countries at no expense to the patient a long time before it became available on the US market. It's a very cheap process in itself, but that doesn't prevent it from being too expensive for many. The prices in the US market are artificially inflated to start with, because of dubious patenting making it possible to charge an arm and a leg.
And the prices don't seem to drop either. Quoting an article I found [abcarticledirectory.com]:
"In 2006, industry sources reported tha
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Except in higher taxes.
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I'm all for it as long as whether you get the boost or not can be based on merit and need and not the size of your parents' wallet.
And re your gym anology, I'd be all for the overweight getting subsidized gym access, because they have a higher need. It would pay for itself from the point of view of society as a whole, but I fear the greedy right would not see it that way, and bitch about spending "their" money on someone else.
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Why, oh why, should everyone be equal?
The dude cleaning toilets does not have the same impact on society than the guy paying your salary.
imho tbh it's far more important that most people have roughly equal opportunity, no discrimination for being black/hispanic/white or no discrimation if you are poor, or not so well educated. Everyone should be respected by their own merit, augmented or not.
If we start discriminating people who want to improve upon themselves beyond the baseline of human capability, we sho
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Judging by the number of people milling around in the parking lot, looking for their car in a spot they parked it some other time, I'd say no.
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Pot for the dumb sheep voters and brain enhancing chips for the ruling elite.
The dumb sheep will votes the elite into power and will be dumb but happy with their pot, while the elite will be smarter and unhappy.
Maybe the smart people will get "soma" to keep them happy too....
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How the hell did you remember that?!