Deactivate your Brain

If you’ve not seen Rebecca Saxe’s TEDTalk about how we are really very good at reading other people’s minds. I recommend it:

The interesting part is the disquiet in the audience that the idea of deactivating a person’s morales provoke. As Rebecca says, right now we can only interrupt certain regions in a very imprecise way. But a lot of the reasons not to worry about this mind altering technology are simply technical limitations.

I think it’s fascinating to watch a well educated audience grasp the magnitude of this kind of science and what it can teach us about ourselves as human animals. I think quite a fair few of them were also thinking about misuses that would be harmful.