Monkeys Brains Alter to Work Robotic Arm

More work from Miguel Nicolelis' lab shows that the concept of self is very plastic. They show the brain adapts by plastically dedicating some "brain structure" for the control of the robot arm.
He talked about this in his seminar in one of my phd courses. It does resonate well with our intuitive feeling about tools. If we move to a different keyboard, and it has a different layout we will be severely slowed down. People that drive a car most likely will describe the experience of driving like the car is somewhat an extension of self. They will probably look at the mirrors without noticing they are doing so, etc.
In this sense, becoming an expert with any tool will mean that we are incorporating this tool into our concept of self. This came into my mind when I realized once that I was using google in the middle of a instant messeger chat with a friend to look for something he wrote down instead of asking him about it. Is web search becoming an extension of our brain ? :) One day we will unconsciously stop storing information in our wet brain because it is there at simple recall distance away in our internet brain.


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Cell phone extensions

Perhaps more prosaic than the google brain, but how many numbers stored in your cell phone (for those that have one) do you remember? Is this because you don't have to remember the number, or because there is no reinforcement of the memory through repeated lookup/redial cycles?


Is web search becoming an extension of our brain ?

This kind of work is truely facinating, potentially paving the way for direct computer-brain interfaces. I have had the same experience using IRC in combination with google as an extension of "myself". Not bothering to explore a topic in conversation, just automatically turning to the web to answer my questions.

Work environment must definitely be an extension of "self", the pickiness shown by hackers about their "environments" (e.g. emacs vs. vi, gnome vs. kde, python vs. perl, terminal setup, desktop setup etc.) I belive demonstrates this.

Don't know if I'll be signing up for the first computer-brain interfaces though. I find there is something primordial and wrong about connecting wires directly into your brain. I assume this is just evolution telling me not to intentionally modify my epithelial barriers, I'm sure I'll get over it when just "thinking" about a web search will automatically retrieve the results. The google-mind...