DailyDirt: Boosting Brainpower
from the urls-we-dig-up dept
The plot of the classic science fiction short story, Flowers for Algernon has been adapted into a wide range of other stories, TV shows and movies. Upgrading a person's intelligence through some unnatural means provides a temporary fix -- resulting in an addiction to intelligence augmentation (or other complications). In reality, some colleges are starting to deal with students abusing drugs meant to treat ADHD but which also seem to increase mental focus in general. However, other methods that don't use prescription medication to boost brainpower might be harder to regulate. Here are just a few links on the subject of boosting brainpower.- The number of people playing around with trans-cranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) is growing -- because zapping your brain with a few volts seems harmless when the upside could be faster learning or relief from anxiety. People experimenting on themselves with about $20 worth of simple electronics could lead to some cool discoveries.. or a lobotomized population of internet users. [url]
- People use way more than 10% of their brain capacity. And 37% of all statistics are completely fabricated. [url]
- Bacteria that live in our intestines could have a significant influence on our brain chemistry. The microbes that live in our bodies are not well studied, but maybe someday researchers will try to engineer bacteria to symbiotically boost our brains. [url]
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Filed Under: adhd, brain, brainpower, flowers for algernon, intelligence, iq, microbiome, symbiosis, tdcs, trans-cranial direct current stimulation
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It's like saying that, because I'm sitting at a desk typing this post right now, that I don't use my feet and therefore they're obviously useless (or do something mysteeeeeeerious that we don't know about.)
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37% made up and 100% slanted
Too bad no one seems to want to rely on the truth to support their cause. They lie and then their credibility is gone.
Their should be a duty of candor for all government organizations that use statistics. And there should be consequences, like employment termination, for whoever authorizes the misleading reports.
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Seriously, 65% of people believe that? I had hoped it was just prevalent in media because of the easy story opportunities it offers, but that actual people realized what a load of crock it is. Maybe there was ambiguity or selection bias in the survey... I can dream, right?
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is complete bullshit and now a hollywood movie will convince the gullible masses it is true, just like many think you can curve bullets, spaceships make noise - pew pew ... ad nauseum.
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Not that reality ever stopped a story that "feels" right from catching on.
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There are other technologies that would have been thought impossible just a few decades, possibly a few years ago. Wrist radios for the population (aka cell phones) were considered to be impossible because of the total bandwidth consumed. Yet I recently had a call from the Great Wall of China to NY,US from one of these impossible devices.
A machine that could focus multiple blast waves through tissue with trivial physical damage to the human subject, while pulverising a 1-2cm stone deep within fragile tissue would have been called impossible a couple of decades ago. But today we call it lithotripsy.
There is an old saying. When a brilliant and distinguished scientist says that something is possible, he is almost always right. If he says that something is impossible, he is almost always wrong.
I won't argue that this is possible. But just off the top of my head, and in a field outside my own. I can see the potential for psuedomagnetic nanoparticles specifically adsorbed onto the nucleus accumbens (reptilian pleasure center), and activated by magnetic fields which might be experienced as pleasure beyond anything currently known to man. Ferociously expensive -- at least at first. Probably far cheaper to just stick a wire into the pleasure core.
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