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Given these facts, it seems unlikely that people would pay to have this injected into themselves. But they do. This is the Botulinum toxin, derived from a bacterium, and it’s commonly marketed under the brand name Botox. When injected into facial muscles, it paralyzes them and thereby reduces wrinkling.
There’s no single place in the brain where that pain is processed. Instead, the event activates several different areas of the brain, all operating in concert. This network is summarized as the pain matrix.
In other words, watching someone else in pain and being in pain use the same neural machinery. This is the basis of empathy.
From an evolutionary point of view, empathy is a useful skill: by gaining a better grasp of what someone is feeling, it gives a better prediction about what they’ll do next.
Why does rejection hurt? Presumably, this is a clue that social bonding has evolutionary importance – in other words, the pain is a mechanism that steers us toward interaction and acceptance by others. Our inbuilt neural machinery drives us toward bonding with others. It urges us to form groups. This sheds light on the social world that surrounds us: everywhere, humans constantly form groups. We bind together through links of family, friendship, work, style, sports teams, religion, culture, skin pigment, language, hobbies, and political affiliation. It gives us comfort to belong to a group –
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Although humans are competitive and individualistic much of the time, it’s also the case that we spend quite a bit of our lives cooperating for the good of the group. This has allowed human populations to thrive across the planet, and to build societies and civilizations – feats that individuals, no matter how fit, could never pull off in isolation.
in particular the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC). This region becomes active when we’re interacting with, or thinking about, other people – but it’s not active when we’re dealing with inanimate objects, like a coffee mug.
As he puts it, by shutting down the systems that see the homeless person as a fellow human, one doesn’t have to experience the unpleasant pressures of feeling bad about not giving money. In other words, the homeless have become dehumanized: the brain is viewing them more like objects and less like people.
This war, like all others, was fueled by an effective form of neural manipulation, one that’s been practiced for centuries: propaganda.
If we want a bright future for our species, we’ll want to continue to research how human brains interact – the dangers as well as the opportunities. Because there’s no avoiding the truth etched into the wiring of our brains: we need each other.
We’re at a moment in human history when the marriage of our biology and our technology will transcend the brain’s limitations.
Our species owes its runaway success to the special properties of the three pounds of matter stored inside our skulls.
As we saw in previous chapters, every time we learn something new, whether it’s the map of London or the ability to stack cups, the brain changes itself. It’s this property of the brain – its plasticity – that enables a new marriage between our technology and our biology.
An example of the latter is the postage stamp-sized device called the BrainPort, which works by delivering tiny electrical shocks to the tongue via a small grid that sits on the tongue.
If it sounds crazy to “see” through your tongue, just keep in mind that seeing is never anything but electrical signals streaming into the darkness of your skull.
After about five days of using the VEST, a person who was born deaf can correctly identify spoken words.
Sensory augmentation
Feeling data
See videos of the VEST in action at eagleman.com
At the moment, we don’t know the limits – or if there are limits – to the kinds of data the brain can incorporate. But it’s clear that we are no longer a natural species that has to wait for sensory adaptations on an evolutionary timescale. As we move into the future, we will increasingly design our own sensory portals on the world. We will wire ourselves into an expanded sensory reality.
How to get a better body
For the past fifty years, the Alcor Life Extension Foundation has been developing technology they believe will allow people living today to enjoy a second life-cycle later.
“Moore’s Law” forecast that as transistors became smaller and more precise, the number that could fit onto a computer chip would double every two years, exponentially increasing computing power over time.
Consider the possibility this way: what if there is nothing special about biological neurons themselves, and instead it’s only how they communicate that makes a person who they are? That prospect is known as the computational hypothesis of the brain.
Can a computer ever be programmed so that it has awareness, a mind? In the 1980s the philosopher John Searle came up with a thought experiment that gets right to the heart of this question. He called it the Chinese Room Argument.
Using this successful farming strategy, the ants build enormous nests underground, something spanning hundreds of square meters. Just like humans, they have perfected an agricultural civilization.
This phenomenon, known as “emergence”, is what happens when simple units interact in the right ways and something larger arises.
Pieces and parts of a system can be individually quite simple. It’s all about their interaction. In many cases, the parts themselves are replaceable.
In his framework, Tononi suggests that a conscious system requires a perfect balance of enough complexity to represent very different states (this is called differentiation) and enough connectivity to have distant parts of the network be in tight communication with one another (called integration). In his framework, the balance of differentiation and integration can be quantified, and he proposes that only systems in the right range experience consciousness.
Tononi’s theory is compatible with the idea that human consciousness could escape its biological origins.
We could exist digitally by running ourselves as a simulation, escaping the biological wetware from which we’ve arisen, becoming non-biological beings. That would be the single most significant leap in the history of our species, launching us into the era of transhumanism.
If uploading proves to be possible, it would open up the capacity to reach other solar systems.
Uploading would be equivalent to achieving the physics dream of finding a wormhole, allowing us to get from one part of the universe to another in a subjective instant.
Uploading may not be all that different from what happens to you each night when you go to sleep: you experience a little death of your consciousness, and the person who wakes up on your pillow the next morning inherits all your memories, and believes him or herself to be you.
