[extropy-chat] Singularity Drugs

[Neil H.]

On 4/14/06, Russell Wallace <russell.wallace at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 4/14/06, Neil H. <neuronexmachina at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Not necessarily. For example, one might imagine some sort of "tweak"
> > which would enhance intelligence at the cost of dramatically increased
> > energy consumption. Something like this would be selected against over the
> > millenia of human evolution, as energy/food was generally hard to come by.
> > In contemporary society however, energy/food is quite easy to get -- indeed,
> > we have huge diet/exercise industries dedicated to trying to get people to
> > consume less food or use more energy.
> >
>
> In principle, sure; the extreme case of this would be uploading to a
> digital substrate that gives 1000-fold speedup by using 20 kilowatts of
> power instead of 20 watts. My guess, for what it's worth, is that you won't
> get any significant degree of that with a simple chemical tweak to the
> existing hardware. (I remember reading that the mitochondria in the brain
> aren't far from their limits already.)
>

You're probably right, but a quick random thought:

Children are able to learn things like new languages much better than
adults, presumably because their brains are in a state of enhanced
plasticity. Perhaps having the brain in such an enhanced plasticity mode
consumes more calories, and after the critical period the brain switches out
of that mode to conserve calories.

If this is true, it may be possible to apply some sort of chemical which
switches the brain back into the "enhanced plasticity mode," which consume
more calories but can learn faster. Of course, this may also have some other
side-effects.

I wonder if anybody's used techniques similar to those of Simon Laughlin
(Zoology prof. at Cambridge) to estimate how the caloric usage of a human
brain changes at various ages.

-- Neil
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