Brain Hacking Is Having Incredible Effects, and It’s Just Getting Started
(Morris MacMatzen/Reuters)
With a jolt of electricity, you might be able to enter a flow state that allows you to learn a new skill twice as quickly, solve problems that have mystified you for hours, or even win a sharpshooting competition.
And this just scratches the surface in terms of what we might be able to do to improve cognition as our understanding of the brain improves. With an implanted chip, the possibilities might be close to limitless.
Researchers think that as we learn more about the brain, we’ll be able to use electricity to boost focus, memory, learning, mathematical ability, and pattern recognition. Electric stimulation may also clear away depression and stave off cognitive decline. We’ll eventually even implant computer chips that allow us to directly search the Web for information or even download new skills — like Neo learning kung fu inThe Matrix.
We’re heading down a path that will allow us to supercharge the brain.
The key is decoding how the brain works. That’s the hurdle in the way, and the one that billions of dollars in research are going toward right now.
“I don’t think there’s any doubt we’ll eventually understand the brain,” says Gary Marcus, a professor of psychology at New York University, and an editor of the upcoming book The Future of the Brain: Essays by the World’s Leading Neuroscientists.
We grow too soon old and too late smart.
It’s true that we are amazingly made. We have discovered incredible wonders, and have recognized our amazing abilities to create and do things we had only imagined could be done. I wonder, though, if we might go too far with our desire to
understand and learn more about ourselves.
The thought of jolting such an important and critical organ as our brain with electricity…or inserting chips into it, seems very risky and frightening to me.