Crazy Ideas Archive

“It will not be we who reach Alpha Centauri and the other nearby stars. It will be a species very like us but with more of our strengths and fewer of our weaknesses… more confident, farseeing, capable and prudent.”              Carl Sagan. ‘Pale Blue Dot’ This was going to be a crazy idea article about increasing human intelligence then Elon Musk launched Neuralink to do just that and the idea went from ‘crazy’ to ‘mainstream’ overnight. The questions now are: how do we do it and should we do it at all? I mage: Gerd Altman / Pixabay Building a Better Brain ‘Smart drugs’ or Nootropics have been around a while. Unfortunately there’s no Limitless-style pill to increase your brain power as yet though there is plenty of information of varying provenance available on-line and a large sub-culture of self-experimenters. Results appear modest and mixed. We could always try adding in intelligence genes with gene editing tools like CRISPR but the problem there i...

If you think you’ve had a bad day at work spare a thought for 14 year old Ahad Israfil. In 1987 his boss knocked a gun to the ground, shooting Ahad in the head and blowing his brains out. A bad day at work certainly, but remarkably, not a terminal day at work. Though he lost the entire right hemisphere of his brain, Ahad survived and recovered well enough to earn an honours degree at his local college not to mention appearing in several TV documentaries. Photo: Meo / Pexels Ahad was the unwitting recipient of an instant hemispherectomy. A surgical procedure where one hemisphere of the brain is surgically removed and the resulting space filled with silicone. This is not to be confused with a callosotomy. That slightly less drastic procedure just cuts the corpus callossum – the bundle of nerve fibers that connect the two hemispheres of the brain. This results in both halves of the brain perceiving, thinking and sometimes acting independently as they respond differently to information rec...