The World Science Festival opened in Chelsea at the Rubin Museum of Art last night. Moderated by Fair Game's Faith Salie, both Vilayanur Ramachandran and Ray Kurzweil held forth in an event called Humanity Now/Humanity Next, about technology and the brain. Ramachandran talked about his work with synesthesia, mirror neurons and phantom limbs. One in fifty people (mostly poets, artists and novelists) have synesthesia--a cross wiring of the brain where numbers are associated with colors or tastes have shapes. Words, said Ramachandran, have swirling halos of association and with synesthesia, their penumbra is bigger so there is a greater overlap. It's no wonder that artists, poets and writers are more genetically inclined to have it--since they traffic in metaphors. He also explained an amazing technique they used on a man with phantom limb pain. The man complained that his missing hand felt like it was clenched so hard that the nails were digging in his palm. An experiment was devised where he looked at the mirror image of his actual hand where the missing hand would be. By looking at the mirror image, the brain could see the "hand" wasn't clenched and, after it was massaged, the pain went away. Ramachandran said you can actually see empathy in the brain through the phenomenon of mirror neurons. When a monkey is in pain, it fires off a neuron. When the same monkey see another monkey in pain, it fires off the same neuron. "It's a case of monkey see, monkey do," he said.
By 2029, Kurzweil said we would see the ultimate merger--a billion-fold increase in technology where machines will be able to pass the Turing test by responding in a way that is indistinguishable from humans--particularly with empathy and humor. Biology is now an information technology science where, in the near future, nanobots released into the bloodstream will be responsible for regulating bodily functions like detecting and destroying cancer cells. Citing the exponential growth similar to Moore's Law in technology, Kurzweil said solar energy will be so developed in seven years that it could provide 100% of the planet's energy needs. "We are less than five years away from the tipping point," he said, "and there are billions of venture capital dollars going into this."
Kurzweil said we understand how the pancreas works--it can be explained by a 'messy algorithm," but science can take that algorithm, clean it up and amplify it with technology. The focus in the coming years will be genetics, nanotechnology and robotics. Oddly, he didn't talk very much about the singularity--the idea that knowledge will increase so fast that it's measurement will be a vertical trajectory. He did say that now people are adding 3 months of life expectancy each year and in 15 years, expectancy will grow by one year every year--and not just for people being born now, but for adults, too. "If you can hang in there," he said, "you could see the next century."--Sherry Mazzocchi
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