"Watch your thoughts; they become words. Watch your words; they become actions. Watch your actions; they become habits. Watch your habits; they become character. Watch your character; it becomes your destiny." -- unknown

Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results - Albert Einstein

TV shows...
April 01, 2007 - 9:13 am

Something struck me as I watched the dogs trot in a line.. and then one by one peel off to the left or right.

How did the dogs know when to peel off? How did the dogs that pushed the prey towards the ambush know where the ambush would be?

In other words, how do animals that don't talk.. communicate the details of such a plan?

Sure you can say they've done it a million times.. they grew up watching it.. they did whatever to learn it -- but how did it start?

Imagine you trying to work out a plan with your friends but not once saying a single word.

Then I was watching a pretty freak show about how the mind can control machines. Basically, the mind runs on electronic impulses. Neuron A fires a pulse to neuron B which goes to C and so on a million or so times and my fingers type, right? Right.

So.. this researcher taught a monkey to play a game. It was to move a joystick-type thing, which moved a small ball of light. The game was to move the small ball of light to a larger ball. How they taught the monkey, I've no idea.. but the monkey learned the game. It was kinda interesting to watch a video of the monkey moving the joystick about and its small dot time and again meeting up with the larger one.

Then.. the researcher implanted some sort of electrodes in the monkey and the could record all the millions of impulses that happen as the monkey moves its arm. The researcher couldn't tell you what was really going on.. but they were mapping out the happenings and recording it.

Then.. they took the recordings and converted it to some sort of computer code and could use the saved impulses to move the dot just like the monkey had done. In other words, they used the recorded monkey thoughts to replay the exact game/moves the monkey had done.

Nothing to freaky there.. right?

Well, once they had the program working right, they hooked the computer directly to the electrodes in the monkey -- no need to record them anymore -- and disconnected the joystick. The monkey still grabbed and moved the joystick, it didn't know any different, but it was really controlling the small ball of light with its mind.

At some point.. the monkey figured out it no longer actually needed to move its arm.. and so there was video of the monkey simply sitting and the ball of light moving about being controlled directly from the monkey's brain.

That's kinda freaky. The mind could interact "directly" without the body in the way.

It's scifi freaky.

By the same basic program, I could be doing all this simply by thinking and not moving my hands. In fact, my body could placed on some sort of life-support system and my mind could, through a computer, interact directly with the world -- second life indeed.

Now you might be thinking.. that would suck. You'd lose all the touch and feel -- but what is touch and feel? Just an interpretation of what my nerves send to my brain. The exact same thing could be done with the computer.. I could feel just as I could now.

A better example is folks who are colorblind. They see the 'wrong' colors (at least as far as everyone else is concerned). In the computer, they'd be 'fixed' and could see correctly.

Perhaps think of our brains as a motherboard.. our minds are the software and our memory is RAM/harddrive and the body as hardware. All we are doing is putting the software into a different machine... a frankenstein upgrade.