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How I Would Optimize My Mind

     If I could augment any part of my body, I would mainly want to improve my nervous system excluding the thought processes of the brain. The nervous system is responsible for all sorts of processes spanning across many organs in the body, but it mainly acts as a network with which your body can communicate with itself, along with deciding how to control and coordinate itself. Hence, a strengthened nervous system would allow for all sorts of different advancements.       The main process I want to improve is my capability to respond to stimuli by optimizing my brain’s shortcomings. According to Rene Marois and Jason Ivanoff in “Capacity limits of information processing in the brain,” three major bottlenecks exist in the human body: time taken to notice and place visual information into visual short-term memory (VSTM), the restricted amount of information that VSTM can hold at once, and, finally, the selection of a response to a stimulus.1 Hence, to a...
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Advantages and Disadvantages in the Progression of Technology

    Dependence on technology is something that I think many of us tend to overlook. This oversight is largely due to the fact that technology comes in many forms other than cell phones and computers. One of the most glaringly obvious technologies we all heavily depend on is agriculture. Without agriculture, it would be far more difficult for us to specialize in different fields and virtually impossible for so many of us to spend time working on things other than food. Hence, most humans get far more choice in how they spend their time than they would get in a world without agriculture. We also are exponentially more resilient to famine and can produce a surplus of food each year without great issues. Another such technology is plumbing. Our cities are far safer–not to mention cleaner–for the simple fact that we are able to dispose of our waste without it readily persisting in our environment. This benefit alone works wonders to prevent disease, both by keeping water supplies c...
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A Collection of Consideration on the Nature of Extraterrestrial Life in the Human Psyche

A Collection of Consideration on the Nature of Extraterrestrial Life in the Human Psyche By Ian Merrifield Along with taking on a vast plethora of forms, Aliens can also serve as metaphors for many different concepts and ideas we experience in life. The sheer versatility of said metaphors display one unique nature of many in our relationship with the rest of the universe: our sheer lack of control in it. Given our excruciatingly small sphere of influence over the cosmos, much of the universe is both unknown and unreachable (in fact, if the universe is truly infinite, then we have discovered exactly 0% of it!), offering a blank check with which a storyteller can afford any version of aliens they see fit, explaining, in turn, why depictions are so varied.           The unknowable nature of extraterrestrial life can inspire all different forms of reactions from people–some recoil, fearing the unknown, while others, guided by loneliness, desperately hope to fi...
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