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So, I was thinking about how to speed up the brain using
optical nerve transmission, which got me thinking. Which is
ironic in a way, but this idea is more coppery than irony.
Nerve conduction in humans is oto 100m/s, meaning that if
you stub your toe, it's going to be 20msec before you're
aware
of it. That's a long time. How can we speed things up?
Well, first of all, we need a new pair of socks. These socks
will have inbuilt sensors for temperature and pressure (at
least), with as many sensors per square centimetre as
possible.
All the sensors will feed into a dense bundle of extremely
fine
copper wires (or fibreoptics), that are taped up the back of
your leg, over your arse, up your back, and run into an
adhesive square that's glued to the back of your neck.
(Nobody uses the back of their neck for anything much, so
it's
effectively free real estate.)
The adhesive square has a dense array of little resistive
heating elements, interspersed with little micromechanical
actuators. The sensors in your socks map ontp the heaters
and
actuators in the patch. Obviously the mapping can't be
perfect, but you'll have a map of your foot projected onto
the
back of your neck.
Initially, this will all be very annoying. When you stub your
toe or step on something hot, you'll first feel a prod or a
hotspot on the back of your neck. About 20ms later, you'll
feel
the normal sensation from your foot, delivered via nerves.
But
the human brain is very adaptable and makes use of
whatever
information it can get. So, over time, the back of your neck
will map itself to your foot naturally. Now, you can feel
that
stubbed toe 20ms earlier than you otherwise would - isn't
that
great?? Of course, it still takes time for the relayed
sensations
to travel from the back of your neck to your brain, but this
is a
much shorter distance than all the way from your toe.
Obviously, gloves are next, and at this point we might need
to
start putting the relay patches onto the face or throat (the
closer to the brain, the better). Now you can feel things
with
your fingers wayyyy faster than anyone else can.
Finally, of course, we'd like to speed up movement as well,
which will be trickier. However, there are already artificial
hands that pick up signals from the upper forearm and relay
them to the mechanical hand. If we can put a pickup on,
say,
the upper arm and use it to electronically stimulate muscles
further down (for instance, that big fat muscle that opposes
your thumb), we'd have a fully accelerated human.
Nature Neuroscience (2008)
https://www.nature..../news.2008.751.html
``In a study published Sunday in Nature Neuroscience, researchers using brain scanners could predict people's decisions seven seconds before the test subjects were even aware of making them.'' [jutta, Mar 08 2019]
[link]
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[Ian], what has happened to you? All of that made sense,
right here in the real world. I feel a little sad. |
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But, yes, of course reflexes are. But the reflex that pulls your
hand away from the hotplate (by the way, why *did* you put
your hand on the hotplate - that was just stupid) still has to
travel from your fingertips to your spinal cord (or wherever
that particular reflex hangs out) and then all the way back to
your arm muscles. Speeding that process up by making it
faster would make it quicker. |
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//For example, the eye has (well, we could call them) “circuits” which sense something flying rapidly toward the eye. The eye itself evaluates this, and the eye in turn triggers the closing of the eyelids. Then, as I say, the brain gets to know about it after it has occurred. Similarly, put your hand on a hotplate and the hand is immediately removed, long before the brain could have done anything about it. These reflexes are well known.// |
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Sorry, this does not compute for me. |
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My hand has no thoughts of its own. My eyes have no thoughts of their own, therefore although these quickened reflexes occur prior to conscious awareness they are in no way autonomous from nerve conduction to subconscious awareness. |
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If this were not true then corpses would blink when poked in the eye. |
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So... you want to speed up cognition?
Figure out how to interface your conscious mind with your subconscious mind while keeping your sanity. |
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Ya just gotta titan the nous. |
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// My hand has no thoughts of its own. My eyes have no
thoughts of their own. // |
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Mine do (not in the sense of behaving in ways I don't want
them to, though). |
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It's also well-known that awareness of a mental decision
trails the detectable brain-state decision by quite a bit of
time -- sometimes as much as 10 seconds! If the decision
could be detected and brought to the attention of the
person making it a bit earlier, much time could be saved as
well. |
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Do you guys have links to this stuff?
Ten seconds?
That's comatose! |
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It doesn't take more than a single heartbeat for me to feel the pain of an adrenaline surge almost to the tips of my extremities when shit hits the fan.
Even a time lag of two seconds would have seen me dead more times than I can count. |
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If the multiverse is a thing then there's a whole lot of dead and mangled me's out there... I've had a few two or three second close-calls stretch out like minutes. |
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If what you say is true then everyone is asleep. |
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//If this were not true then corpses would blink when
poked in the eye.// |
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Do you personally know that they don't [2 fries]? We value
empirical evidence on this forum. |
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Using this approach, there's no reason why the sensors which detect potential pain-causing events should not transmit via some local radio-based link to a unit on the back of someone else's neck so that when person A stubs their toe, person B will feel a sharp pain in the back of their neck. In the future, wearing such a device will be the default punishment for people who use the word 'literally' when they mean 'metaphorically' as it will be a necessary precondition for them to be able to truthfully say "I literally feel your pain". |
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//It doesn't take more than a single heartbeat// |
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The point [jutta] is making is that that's how it *feels* to
you, but in fact there's a delay in consciousness. Basically,
your brain does stuff and makes decisions, and then tells
you about it afterwards and makes it feel as if you were
conscious of it in realtime. |
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For instance, you see X about to fall on Y, realize that Y is
going to explode, and leap behind some cover before it
happens. It all feels as if it's in realtime. In reality, your
brain saw X falling, predicted an explosion, and made you
jump behind cover long before you were consciously aware
of anything. But your brain backfills to make everything
make sense. |
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A ten second lag is unusual, but smaller lags are happening
all the time. Analysing and responding to things is
relatively fast, but consciousness is slow and has to follow
behind. If we waited for consciousness, we'd all be dead. |
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Yes, it's like the difference in your auditory and visual processing pathways - they represent very different problems taking different amounts of time to complete and each needs to process data over a span of time to arrive at a conclusion as to what is happening 'now' - however, your brain cleverly fudges all this to make it look like when someone talks, the sounds occur in synchrony with their mouth movements. |
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Nope, I've never actually poked a corpse in the eye. |
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You know the filter that the subconscious mind has? The one that keeps extraneous sensory perception like after-images and the individual firing of the rods and cones in our eyes from conscious awareness in that time-lag? |
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Well, It seems that I was not born with that filter.
I think I may have gotten cross-wired during gestation or traumatized enough in early childhood that I needed to shut it off, but either way I am consciously aware of all of those subconscious nuances and that time-lag thing seems to be lacking as well if my reflexes are any indication. |
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They're calling it Visual Snow and classifying it as a symptom of disease, but it's no disease. It's just more input than most people can stand. |
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I guess what I'm saying is that there are exceptions to every rule and that the conscious/subconscious time-lag thing must hugely vary from individual to individual. |
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After-images aren’t “extraneous” - they’re what
allows you to see films at the cinema despite being
shown a blank screen for half the time |
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Not to mention the fact that allow the brain to paste in
information to mask things like eye movements and
blinking. |
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Actually, that would be a cool demonstration. Use gaze
tracking to follow someone's eyes as they watch a film, and
have a camera re-film a small part of whatever's on the
screen, but tracking their gaze. Then you could see what
the eye actually sees - a blur most of the time as it shifts
from point to point. Of course, you'd then add your own
eye movements when you were watching _that_, which
would compound the effect; but maybe put a red dot in the
middle of the screen and stay focussed on that to eliminate
those movements. |
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Which reminds me of a cool experiment (which maybe
someone here told me about once). Stand in front of a
mirror, and look at your left eye, then right, then left etc.
You will never see your eyes moving, even though someone
else watching you can see them moving. Your brain just
backfills the image while your eyeballs move. |
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<moments later> And further to the above, if you use your
computer as a mirror (eg, Photobooth on a Mac), you *can*
see your eyes moving, because of the delay between reality
and the image on the screen. |
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//After-images aren’t “extraneous” - they’re what allows you to see films at the cinema despite being shown a blank screen for half the time// |
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I'm not talking about persistence of vision. I mean palinopsia. Everything I've ever seen I see superimposed on the next thing I look at for a second or two in either a positive or negative after-image depending on contrasts between the images.
I see tracers behind all moving objects.
I see the blood flow and veins in my eyes.
The movements of white blood cells and pretty much every entoptic visual phenomenon all day, every day. |
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I don't have the filter that smooths things out for the vast majority and just take all of the data in raw and uncut in real-time. |
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If I hadn't seen this way since birth I'm sure I'd be as messed up by it as are all the people insisting that these things are symptoms.
Google visual-snow to see just how disabled I'm supposed to be according to those who suffer from their amplified awareness. |
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Of the tiny percentage of the population to perceive this way, I'm in an even smaller percentage of people who are not just good with it, but visually kick ass because of it. |
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'struth... no subconscious filter. |
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Hey, if you're trying to convince us you're 2 fries shy of a
happy meal, I personally am already convinced. I am willing
to believe that you're the bell-end of the curve. |
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<shrugs>
Just tellin it like it is. |
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// they’re what allows you to see films at the cinema despite being
shown a blank screen for half the time // |
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That's persistence of vision, and I don't see why it evolved when we
evolved without motion pictures. Wouldn't seeing faster motion have
been more beneficial? |
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// If I hadn't seen this way since birth I'm sure I'd be as messed up by
it as are all the people insisting that these things are symptoms.
Google visual-snow to see just how disabled I'm supposed to be
according to those who suffer from their amplified awareness. // |
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I wonder if we could find a way to learn to switch the filter(s) on and
off at will. Then anybody who learns to do that can get their own
firsthand understanding of what the experience is like both ways.
Maybe then they'd stop pathologizing your experience, and maybe it
would be widely found to be a useful skill. |
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I like these HB threads where [2fries] claims to
have sensory abilities and experiences which are
quite different to those of us ordinary folk |
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It ain't easy telling it like it is. |
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//I wonder if we could find a way to learn to switch the filter(s) on and off at will.// |
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Once you start noticing these things you can't un-notice them again. Everybody sees the same things I do, it's just edited out for them during the time-lag between subconscious awareness and conscious thought. |
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You would have some very happy campers if you could figure out a way to re-filter the Visual Snow sufferers. |
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Sturton has had something similar. Last week on the 'phone
from Les Menuires he was complaining that wherever he
looked he saw little white flecks, like snow, all across his field
of vision. Turned out it was snowing. |
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And speaking of odd perceptions (and completely irrelevent to
everything here), I tried that "impossible colour" thing where
you look at blue in one eye and yellow in the other and
superimpose the images (like viewing a stereogram). It's
really interesting - I see a colour that's both blue and yellow,
and the only way I can tell it's weird is that I can't put a name
to it. On the other hand, when I try the red/green
combination I either get alternating swirls of red and green,
or something like burnt umber. |
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I tried that thing many years ago, but only with the blue and
yellow. I just got patches fading back and forth between
blue and yellow, but I wouldn't call it swirls. Maybe I should
try again, and with other colors. |
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So, I was thinking, so I was, about not starting
everything I say with the word so, so I was. |
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//I just got patches fading back and forth between blue and
yellow// Try concentrating on the dot in the middle (there's
normally a dot in the middle of each colour). Surprisingly, the
blue-yellow doesn't look especially weird; it's only when you
try to name it that you realize it isn't anything you've seen
before. |
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I tried both the blue/yellow and the red/green ones on
Wikipedia just now. I got no new colors, just the existing
ones fading back and forth. |
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ETA: I tried Wikipedia's chimerical color demo as well. For the first
one, I got just a deep blue circle which became a radial gradient on
the black background, not "simultaneously blue and deep black". For
the second, I got a pink circle which faded to a radial gradient on the
white background. For the third, the same with bright orange on burnt
orange. No new colors AFAICT. For the orange one, the afterimage was
indeed more saturated than the background, which I presume was
made to be "100% saturated", but I can put that down to my monitor's
limited color gamut, right? |
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Yes, I didn't get much excitement from those "after-image"
impossible colours either. Only the blue/yellow superposition
image gave me a new "colour". |
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