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 accomplish my goal, I would endeavor to enhance these three functions of my brain, as well as support them throughout my body’s nervous system.
    The first of the three issues would allow for improvements in processing multiple stimuli in faster periods of time since a single visual stimulus can take more than half a second to be processed.2 Without this limitation I would be able to interpret and understand complicated situations quite quickly. Most critically, improving this capability would hopefully alleviate any additional strain my nervous system would be under from the other enhancements I want to make.
    The second change I want to make is the simplest to improve with technology since modern computers are already leagues above human brains as far as storing information and processing multiple tasks simultaneously are concerned. The primary benefit here would be the increase the amount of stimuli I can use, along with allowing less to slip by me.
    The third augmentation to my brain would be the most cumbersome for me since I would rather not significantly change my personality. However, the main issue with this part of the process is critically “not from the time required for processing information” but the “reciprocal exchange of information across the neural nodes of the network.”3 Therefore, even if I do not directly upgrade the speed my brain can run at or alter the structures I use to think, simply optimizing these processes would allow the current features to run far better than they currently are.
    With all of these improvements, I would be significantly more aware than any other human since my body’s communication and control network would be optimized so much further. I would be able to swiftly respond to situations in logical and practical ways that standard reflexes could not offer. And, most importantly, I would hopefully not fry my brain with information or destroy my personality in the process (although this could very well still happen due to the nature of the changes being made here).

1: René Marois and Jason Ivanoff, "Capacity Limits of Information Processing in the Brain," Trends in Cognitive Sciences 9, no. 6 (2005): 296, doi.org.
2: Ibid
3: Ibid

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