The Dawn of the Postliterate Age, page 2.
Cybernetics and the Coming Era of Instantaneous Communication

Consider the plight of the news editor or book publisher trying to sell carefully composed, researched, and fact-checked editorial content today, when an impatient public views even Web publishing as plodding. Then imagine the potential impact of cybernetic telepathy.

In the past few years, amazing breakthroughs involving fMRI, or functional magnetic resonance imaging — with potential ramifications for education — have become an almost daily occurrence. The fMRI procedure uses non-ionizing radiation to take detailed pictures of soft tissue (specifically the brain) that tends to show up as murky and indistinct on computed tomography scans. The scanner works like a slow-motion movie camera, taking new scans continuously and repeatedly. Instead of observing movement the way a camcorder would, the scanner watches how oxygenated hemoglobin (blood flow) is diverted throughout the brain. If you’re undergoing an fMRI scan and focusing one portion of your brain on a specific task, like exerting your anterior temporal lobe on pronouncing an unfamiliar word, that part of the brain will expand and signal for more oxygenated blood, a signal visible to the scanner.

In 2005, researchers with the Scientific Learning Corporation used fMRI to map the neurological roots of dyslexia and designed a video game called Fast ForWord based on their findings. The project was “the first study to use fMRI to document scientifically that brain differences seen in dyslexics can be normalized by neuroplasticity-based training. Perhaps of greater relevance to educators, parents, and the children themselves are the accompanying significant increases in scores on standardized tests that were also documented as a result of the intervention,” neuroscience experts Steve Miller and Paula Tallal wrote in 2006 in School Administrator.

Fast ForWord is likely the forerunner of many products that will use brain mapping to market education “products” to schools or possibly to parents, a commercial field that could grow to include not just software, but also chemical supplements or even brain implants. In much the same way that Ritalin improves focus, fMRI research could lead to electronic neural implants that allow people to process information at the speed of electric currents — a breakthrough possible through the emergent field of cybernetics.

Speculative nonsense? To Kevin Warwick, an IT professor at Reading University in the United Kingdom, our cybernetic future is already passé. In 2006, Warwick had an experimental Internet-ready microchip surgically implanted in his brain. Building on the success of widely available implants like the cochlears that treat certain types of deafness, Warwick’s implant research dealt with enhancing human abilities. In a December 2006 interview with I.T. Wales, he discussed an experiment he took part in with his wife, wherein the couple actually traded neural signals — a crude form of telepathy.

Warwick wore an electrode implant that linked his nervous system (not his actual brain) directly to the Internet. His wife, Irina, had a similar implant, and the two were able to trade signals over the Internet connection.

“When she moved her hand three times,” Warwick reported, “I felt in my brain three pulses, and my brain recognized that my wife was communicating with me.”

In April 2009, a University of Wisconsin–Madison biomedical engineering doctoral student named Adam Williams posted a status update to the social networking site Twitter via electroencephalography or EEG. EEG records the electrical activity that the brain’s neurons emit during thought. Williams, seated in a chair with the EEG cap on his head, looked at a computer screen displaying an array of numbers and letters. The computer highlighted the letters in turn, and when the computer highlighted a letter Williams wished to use, his brain would emit a slightly different electrical pulse, which the EEG would then pick up to select that letter.

“If you’re looking at th”” said Williams. “But when the ‘R’ flashes, your brain says, ‘Hey, wait a minute. Something’s different about what I was just paying attention to.’ And you see a momentary change in brain activity.”

Williams’s message to the world of Twitter? “Using EEG to send tweet.”

While advancement in cybernetics and the decline in literary culture appear, at first glance, completely unrelated, research into cyber-telepathy has direct ramifications for the written word and its survivability. Electronic circuits mapped out in the same pattern as human neurons could, in decades ahead, reproduce the electrical activity that occurs when our natural transmitters activate. Theoretically, such circuits could allow parts of our brain to communicate with one another at greater levels of efficiency, possibly allowing humans to access data from the Web without looking it up or reading it.

The advent of instantaneous brain-to-brain communication, while inferior to the word in its ability to communicate intricate meaning, may one day emerge as superior in terms of simply relaying information quickly. The notion that the written word and the complex system of grammatical and cultural rules governing its use would retain its viability in an era where thinking, talking, and accessing the world’s storehouse of information are indistinguishable seems uncertain at best.

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