(Brain Machine Interface) That Neuralink thing..
So I was watching this documentary yesterday, Sugar Coated, while waiting for a couple of episodes of Netflix's Turned On, and wondered if this war on Sugar is really a bad thing. If sugars are actually toxins in the quantities we're consuming. The general consensus is that Fructose is bad, but the guys is saying they are all the same. Tooth decay, which I've dealt with personally, diabetes which runs in my family, cancers, also, and heart disease are all major risks we have to deal with due to these high blood sugar levels. IF they aren't processed out properly. But if you consider how much energy the brain might require once we're using our brains more to communicate with each other and machines don't we need more high energy nutrition?
The secondary argument, the more popular one, had been that fat is the problem. But fat is brain food. There's that butter coffee thing that says so long as you take in the fat and process it, you're fine. What I took out of the show was that we could take it down, the fat and sugar consumption, and eat better forms of food, less processed foods, but ultimately we will need better high energy nutrition.
Scientist say REM uses as much if not more blood sugar and oxygen as when we're awake. What happens when we have extra brain cells and machine interfaces in our brains? We'll burn more sugars and need more stored up fats and a better metabolism to process our food into brain energy. One topic of conversation was that some of these low power radios could work using blood sugar. That means no toxic batteries and low enough power consumption that we won't have to deal with the old antennas and output power of old radios and still have very high speed connections. Do we just have liver bypasses to have blood sugar piped into these machine augmentations? You'd permanently be on dialysis? For that matter why wouldn't the next logical move for Musk be artificial organs.
I like that they brought up the topic of resolution as well. What is resolution when you're talking about thoughts? The ability for our minds to conjure up moving images is amazing and really untapped, but if the resolution is really bad and thus limits our creativity, it's probable that being able to augment those processes digitally will make already creative people even more creative. Especially if there's no wall between their minds and the screen like language. One of the really life changing things that will come about will be an increase in that internal resolution. And probably the resolution of the complexity of our lives with the simple systems we've evolved to cope with them.
We aren't furry little critters in a forest trying to forage and find mates, we actually have really complicated shit that needs to be sorted out and those older regions of the brain haven't evolved to cope. We keep piling on these new structures for extra processing of the world but aren't really managing to keep up properly when we're not awake.
It will really be interesting to see what it would be like to be connected 24/7. Can we learn to function like the birds they talked about do? Awake for weeks at a time? I've done it for 4 days straight. Not really sure how I managed to not die, but there's a period in there when you just don't care about sleeping as long and you can have some down time. And several Iced Caps.
But on that 4th day, driving back from Toronto to Montreal (having left Montreal to go to my aunt's bed and breakfast in Ottawa then Toronto to help my other aunt move).. I swear to god I have no idea how I didn't die. I got home and I still wasn't really looking to sleep. I wasn't up for long but it was like leveling out when I'd been hurtling toward the ground.
Will it be the same thing? if say in 10 years you're a university student working on parallel majors and taking advantage of enriched learning sessions 24/7. How do you turn it off?
Some people see BMI as another version of a cell phone, but what if it is something that IS always on. Yuo phone is always on. Getting notifications, being in multiple conversations, running internal apps with internal assistant programs.. how do you turn it off?