What if we can start routing our thinking processes the way we route air travel?
The concept of a networked brain isn’t so different from the transportation grids used by cars and planes, says Martijn van den Heuvel, a neuroscientist at Utrecht University Medical Center who led the new study.
“If you’re flying from New York to Amsterdam, you can do it in a direct flight. It’s much more effective than going from New York, then to Washington, and then to Amsterdam. It’s exactly the same idea in the brain,” he says.
Per this model, intelligence is a factor not of the number of connections inside the brain, but the efficiency with which those connections are wired together. Apparently the arrangement of non-nueron-carrying white matter is also a major factor. Seeing as this basic plumbing ought to be reasonably reconfigurable — once we know how — this research begins to look like something that might push us towards greater than human intelligence in a fairly straightforward way.
But let’s not plan those The Singularity Is Here parties quite yet.
For one thing, as the article points out:
The first order of business will be to determine what physical and biochemical properties create more efficient brain network
Well, that’s a fairly tall first order of business, now isn’t it? First we have to figure out what those properties are, then we have to figure out how we can manipulate them. It may well all be doable, but a lot of heavy spade work lies ahead. And that’s not the only difficulty. Alvis Brigis argues pretty convincingly that we don’t yet have a precise and mutually agreed upon definition of what we mean by “intelligence.”
Back when I used to lead process improvement teams for the product engineering and development group at U S WEST Advanced Technologies, we had a saying — “You can’t improve what you can’t measure.” In retrospect, this is not entirely true. I believe something like “reliably” or “consistently” belongs in there between the “can’t” and the “improve.” And if we can’t reliably improve something that we can’t measure, it seems equally axiomatic that we can’t measure what we haven’t properly defined.
Not to be a buzzkill, I’m just saying that a little progress in this area is still a long way from any of us dropping by the clinic for a quick brain reconfiguration and an additional 60 IQ points. But still, it could very well be (early and embryonic) progress in exactly that direction.