From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Wed Jun 19 2002 - 14:21:07 MDT
On Wed, Jun 19, 2002 at 01:02:57PM -0400, CurtAdams@aol.com wrote:
>
> Well, there must be thousands of people who've put years into figuring out
> how to make things smarter with chemicals and recently gene engineering.
> Rather few results so far - caffeine is a modest memory boost, etc.
> That's teraseconds, not just a few.
I think we are talking about hundreds of people, tops. Although we tend
to think of things like life extension and intelligence enhancement as
obvious and good research projects, most people don't see it that way.
To make a quick sum up, we seem to have a large number of memory
enhancing chemicals of varying usability; they even act on different
stages on the memory consolidation process so it might be possible to
potentiate effects by the right combination (good research project! add
to todo list!), but the overall enhancement is somewhat limited (no
orders of magnitude here). Attention improvement seems harder, but there
are some drugs affecting it, as well as working memory and alertness.
Genetic modifications have achieved at least memory improvement
comparable to a good memory enhancer. So far nobody has ever found
anything that seem to increase problem solving skills ("intelligence")
outside narrow areas.
All these changes are simple changes, and presumably could be imitated
by simple mutations (the Doobie mouse of Tsien et al just overexpressed
a receptor version already found in normal mice). Most likely the reason
selection has not favored them is that mammals in general do not
need better memory and similar skills than they already have, and the
drawbacks in higher metabolic needs and increased forgetting of certain
things would be larger than the marginal benefit. It is interesting to
note that humans seem to have a very well developed monoaminergic
control system; maybe our evolutionary trick wasn't a new brain design
but better self-control over mental processes and attention allocation
(chimps are rather distractable).
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension! asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/ GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y
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