I’ve been doing quite a bit of thinking about the way humans interact with machinery and how that can be enhanced through a BEI (Brain-Electrics-Interface). This sort of device is known by many names in many stories, perhaps most notable being called a Datajack. BEIs are the next stage in our technological evolution. The open the door to seemingly limitless possibilities and raise the question: Is there a limit to human performance?
The role of a BEI can be to accelerate speed at which impulses crash around the brain. Diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) is one way that we can record the speed of the human thought process. Now imagine there were a device within your brain that could speed up your thoughts. How fast could you think? Is there an upper limit? What sort of stress would this cause to the brain tissue?
Here is what I think: The faster things are in the physical world, the more wear an tear they seem to endure. This is not a perfect rule. In fact, I am basing this entirely on the concept of friction–which may not apply to thought. If there is in fact resistance that occurs in the transfer of thought, then this can effect the structural integrity at the higher levels of thought speed. Thought speed is related to the amount of dendrites built up in the brain. In this way the brain is like a muscle. The more you use it, the stronger it gets.
Here comes the tricky part. What if we could artificially manufacture and place dendrites. How would that effect brain conduction? Would we think faster if there were a way to create more dendrites and apply them to the required thought pathways?
This leads to many more conversations about regulations and the idea of sentience. I can see this leading to a story about a doctor who fumbles around in her lab and constructs such a thing (a la planet of the apes) and the resulting chaos that follows. This is of course how my mind works and the round about way in which I come to story concepts. And that is really the point of this article.