Brain Machine Interface

What would we do without the VPRO? From before I was born, this Dutch Public Television broadcasting organization has been bringing us arguably the best TV anywhere. From some of the funniest stuff ever made (Koot & Bie!) to incredibly intelligent, truly independent documentaries, if I had to choose only one thing to watch for the rest of my life it would be the VPRO. Time after time, its series called “Tegenlicht” teaches us so much, without ever getting in the way with opinions and the episode from April 10th of this year was another mind-blower.

Called “Het Gretige Brein”, or “The Eager Brain”, it deals with the learning capacity and desires of our most potent organ. My goodness, it was fascinating. Connecting directly to neurons is now part of what’s called the Brain-Machine Interface, or Brain-Computer Interface. Scientists have already literally connected two monkeys’ brains through the internet, one in Brazil and on in the US! Things taught to one, affect the mind of the other. It’s crazy! There are people talking about ‘liberating’ the mind from the limitations of the physical body, something that’s been speculated on for a while, but now they’re throwing in predictions of the year we will start doing it: 2035. It’s been shown that we can teach our grey matter to control robot arms, as if they were original equipment, merely by imagining the movement of a real limb, and reading the part of the brain that normally controls such thing. We’re making some serious progress here…

You know, it’s pretty scary actually, especially because of the proven gullibility of the typical human. We are setting ourselves up for something, that’s for sure. Imagine if we all upload ourselves to some giant mainframe, preferring to live without our fragile bodies. The funny thing is that we could literally be erased out of existence by wiping one system! Seems far more fragile than our imperfect bodies, doesn’t it? Just like we are blindly going headfirst into the progress that digital technology gives us. We are going to give up our POTS (plain old telephone service) copper wiring, to be replaced by VOIP systems that are worthless without all the computers necessary to operate them, ripping out an infrastructure installed over many decades. After the earthquake here in 1994, guess what still worked and what didn’t…….