Every December the online intellectual salon called Edge,
presided over by literary agent John Brockman, asks a select (virtual)
assembly of scientists to ponder a question, such as what they are
optimistic about (2007), what “dangerous” ideas they have (2006) and
what they believe is true but cannot prove (2005). As the bell tolls on
2008 and rings in 2009, Edge is unveiling this year’s: “What
game-changing scientific ideas and developments do you expect to live to
see?” As usual, the offerings vary as much in quality as a cheap spumante
does from Dom Perignon. Predictably, contributors foresee space
colonization and the discovery of intelligent life elsewhere in the
universe. More intriguing, there are predictions that a new human
species will evolve from Homo sapiens, and that we will
discover how to identify the brain pattern that indicates a person is
about to commit a violent act (and will also discover how to suppress
that pattern). Read them yourself, but here are a handful that will give your brain a good workout to start the New Year: *Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner
foresees a day when it will be possible to “delineate the nature of
talent.” Genetics will reveal whether “highly talented individuals have a
distinctive, recognizable genetic profile,” while neuroscience will
show whether there are “structural or functional neural signatures” of
talent. As for the game-changing part (especially in a society where
people have the delusion that everyone is equally talented, or can
become so), imagine what happens if these signatures can be recognized
in infancy. *Physicist Freeman Dyson
of the Institute for Advanced Study imagines the development of “tools
to observe and direct the activities of a human brain in detail from the
outside,” making possible “observation or control of a brain.” Since
microwaves travel through brain tissue, putting a microwave transmitter
inside a brain would let its activity be sent to the outside world,
making possible what he calls “radiotelepathy, the direct communication
of feelings and thoughts from brain to brain.” Change everything? Oh
yeah. Radiotelepathy could be used for good or for evil, Dyson writes,
“a basis for mutual understanding and peaceful cooperation of humans all
over the planet . . . [or] a basis for tyrannical oppression and
enforced hatred between one communal society and another. . . . A
society bonded together by radiotelepathy would be experiencing human
life in a totally new way.” *Neurobiologist Leo Chalupa
of UC Davis looks forward to the day when science can restore the
plasticity of the adult brain to what it was in early childhood. If “the
high degree of brain plasticity normally evident only during early
development can now be made to occur throughout the life span,” he
writes, it would be “a game changer in the brain sciences. Imagine being
able to restore the plasticity of neurons in the language centers of
your brain, enabling you to learn any and all languages effortlessly and
at a rapid pace. The restoration of neuronal plasticity would also have
important clinical implications since unlike in the mature brain,
connections in the developing brain are capable of sprouting (i.e. new
growth).” |