5 years, 11 months ago

Brain-Machine Interfaces Could Give Us All Superpowers

One rainy day, Bill was riding his bicycle when the mail truck in front of him suddenly stopped. Taryn Southern, the co-director of the film, says she began thinking about the brain just as shows like Black Mirror and Westworld, which play on the relationship between humans and technology, began their ascendency. She found herself fascinated by the ways science fiction reimagined the role machines could play in human evolution—not just improving alongside humans, but actually changing the human species. "There seemed to be this disconnect between the dystopian ideas that we see in those shows and what was actually happening in the real world," says Southern, who considers herself a techno-optimist. There are a hundred billion neurons in the brain, each of them "as complicated as the city of Los Angeles" with about 500 trillion connections, says David Eagleman, a neuroscientist who appears in the film.

Wired

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