Elon Musk has said that a new brain implant that he is working on could cure depression and addiction. In a series of tweets he called the notion both “great and terrifying” because when you boil it all down, our brain works on a series of electrical impulses. More details about the Neuralink project will be coming on August 28th.
This may be wishful thinking but if this could be true it would be a great option for turning yourself into a super computer. Or at least help folks who suffer from depression and addiction in a more successful way than pills or other medications. Some meds work for people, while others just never quite get what they need. So the idea of this is actually quite enticing.
This isn’t the first time Elon Musk has talked about mind altering technology. On the Joe Rogan Experience Podcast he mentioned that one day we would be able to talk telepathically if we had the technology embedded.
“You wouldn’t need to talk. You would be able to communicate very quickly and with far more precision,” he said.
It’s actually not far off, in a report from the Royal Society of Science in 2019 it said that neural interfaces could allow people to communicate seemingly by reading each other’s minds.
“People could become telepathic to some degree, able to converse not only without speaking but without words – through access to each other’s thoughts at a conceptual level. Not only thoughts, but sensory experiences, could be communicated from brain to brain. Someone on holiday could beam a ‘neural postcard’ of what they are seeing, hearing, or tasting into the mind of a friend back home.”
It sounds like something out of Black Mirror to be able to communicate like that and one would worry about these devices becoming too invasive. But it would be neat to be able to send a shock to your system every time it sensed that you were craving something or were starting to feel down.
What do you think of this? Tell us in the comments!
