The
most interesting upgrades aren’t for your computer, your car, or even
the internet - they’re for you. We’ve always tinkered with our own
thought processes (using crude equipment like “alcohol” and “regular
exercise”) but now mankind has the tools and time to tune the system
directly, and one team of scientists may make yellow sticky notes
obsolete: they’ve found a way to boost visual memory.
A team of scientists at the Spanish University of Malaga were
working with rat brains, because of the combination of ethics and
wimpiness that prevents human trials. They found that a particular
protein (RGS-14) boosted a region of the brain known as the “V2
secondary visual cortex”, which makes rats sound significantly more
like Terminators than you previously thought. (Nightmares resulting
from that image are not our responsibility).
Increasing the
levels of this protein upgraded the rats visual memory allowing them to
remember things for fifteen hundred times longer than normal (two
months instead of an hour). The interesting aspect is that this
upgrade isn’t a new property, but a re-routing of existing processes -
the protein seems to cause the formation of long term memories instead
of short term, gifting the rat with what could be a photographic visual
memory. Which, considering that these are actual lab rats with needles
being jabbed into their brains, probably sucks quite a lot. The team
also found that destruction of the V2 region utterly eliminated all
visual memory of the past - which you can view as research, cruel, or
gifting the the rats with a Zen state that takes decades of meditation
to achieve.
The potential applications are obvious, and
enormous, but beware the hidden downsides - the human brain is the most
incredibly sophisticated system ever even conceived of and any
tinkering can have huge side effects. This doesn’t mean don’t do
anything (we’d still be in caves otherwise), but be aware that you
can’t say “IF this THEN that” where neural networks are concerned.
Intelligence-upgrades are an inevitable field, already in progress with
prototype products like piracetam and caffeine, so it’s time to make up
your mind if you’re going to make your own mind.
Luke McKinney
http://io9.com/5306489/a-drug-that-could-give-you-perfect-visual-memory
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/325/5936/87
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