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Neurocosmetics: wireheads for congress

neurospasmNeurocosmetics has yet to take off in the backstreets of Birmingham, but is likely to change everything, at least according to Marcel Kinsbourne in his Edge question answer:

…the novel method of deep brain stimulation (DBS), by which electrodes are inserted into the brain to stimulate precisely specified locations electrically, is already used to correct certain brain disorders (Parkinsonism, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder).

Not only are the targeted symptoms often relieved; there have been profound changes in personality, although the prior personality was not abnormal.

A patient of lifelong somber disposition may not only be relieved of obsessions, but also shift to a cheerful mood, the instant the current is switched on (and revert to his prior subdued self, the instant it is switched off). The half empty glass temporarily becomes the glass that is half full. The brain seems not entirely to respect our conventional sharp distinction between what is normal and what is not.

Paging Larry Niven, Arthur C. Clarke, Iain Banks, Greg Egan et al – but how will society change when people are free to choose their personalities at a whim?

In fact, could that be the solution to the Fermi Paradox? Could it be that all technological civilizations advance to the point where they develop a technique for inducing whatever their alien equivalent of permanent happiness is and then stop developing?

If you can track down a copy Arthur C. Clarke’s The Lion of Comarre deals with a similarly themed subject rather well.

[from the Edge question][image from TheAlieness GiselaGiardino²³]

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Teh intarwub – still killing reading, apparently, despite the evidence otherwise

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rabbit reading emailO NOES!!!1 Teh webz be steelin ur brain-bukkitz! This doom-mongering about the internet and its insidious power to erode literacy just never seems to go out of fashion with opinion columns, but I’m surprised to find this one on The Guardian‘s technology blog, courtesy of one Naomi Alderman. Here’s a few choice snippets (because, y’know, I doubt you can be bothered to read the whole thing):

… reading on the internet isn’t the same as reading a book. Recent studies have indicated that online reading tends to break down in the face of “texts that require steady focus and linear attention”. University teacher friends have told me that some of their freshers have started to write in a similar fashion to the way we apparently read online. All the right keywords are in the right paragraphs, but the sentences don’t follow on coherently from each other. Their essays are meant to be skimmed, not read.

[snip]

My family is fortunate to have preserved some of the hundreds of letters my grandmother exchanged with her brothers, Alan and Henry, while they were fighting in the second world war. They didn’t write these letters to improve their skills in comprehension and composition; they did it because it was the only way to stay in touch. If they’d had mobile phones and been able to call each other every day, I’m sure they’d have done so.

Blah blah blah. TL; DR, complete with a reference to WW2 to shame us in the light of the sacrifices of our elders, who had the dignity to sit in muddy trenches writing letters while they waited to be shot to burger meat. But for the classic “everything was better in the old days” capstone quote:

But while I hate to side with the neophobes I can’t help feeling a little concerned; as the loss of the ancient Greek oral culture shows, ways of thinking and using our brains can disappear for good.

YA RLY; new ways of thinking are always bad news, aren’t they? Hey, if it hadn’t been for those damned Greeks and their progressive philosophies, we’d still be sat in little stone houses thinking that lightning storms were the gods playing war… how far we’ve fallen since then! [image by tm lv]

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Peter Watts: the Bush presidency was the most successful ever

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Bush Street signSo, America, you’ve got a new President – and high time too. But here burst your bubble and put your hopes into perspective is science fiction author Peter Watts, who not only warns against expecting Obama to be anything other than a politician, but also points out that the Bush presidency was the most successful presidency ever:

This may strike some as an odd position to take. After all, the Cheney/Bush years saw the world’s most powerful nation descend from surplus into trillion-dollar deficit; saw the prosecution of two unnecessary and (so far) unsuccessful wars; saw the evisceration of civil rights at home and US reputation abroad, the gutting of environmental protection, the relentless remorseless grinding of science beneath the heel of political expediency, and— finally, inevitably— the meltdown of a global economy based, even at the best of times, on consensual hallucination. And yet, to criticize that administration for these things is like describing me as a shitty writer because my novels don’t appeal to fundamentalist Christians. You don’t impugn the archer for missing the bullseye when he was aiming for a deer; success must be judged against the intended goal.

Ouch; read the whole thing. [image by Jef Poskanzer]

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