Professor of Electrical Engineering Bart Kosko joined Ian Punnett (Twitter) to discuss the latest updates in brain hacking. Kosko explained how the brain is like "a market place in your skull," where the system works to equilibrate in a similar way to the economic law of supply equals demand. The interior brain has changed little over the course of human evolution, he continued, noting growth has taken place in the outer folds of cortex. Kosko described brain function as asynchronous, non-linear, and vast, and identified the bottleneck of brain hacking to getting a microchip to communicate with the wet material of the brain.
"It's not a question of whether, it's just when," he said. An immediate benefit of brain hacking will likely be seen in the areas of pain relief and vision enhancement. According to Kosko, another benefit of brain hacking will be to boost memory, either in intensity or capacity. "You don't have to take calculus, you can just download the current edition of it," he revealed. There will be an explosion of chip implants once the bridge between neurons and hardware is developed, Kosko speculated, while warning of possible effects on privacy. The more we rely on digital structures for things like memory, the easier it will be to manipulate those structures, he cautioned.
Kosko also talked about his book, Cool Earth, which imagines a world-wide geoengineering project to gently move the earth-moon system a little farther away from the sun in order to fix global warming. This causes catastrophic unintended consequences, he revealed.
Murder of Eduardo Tirella
In the first hour, award-winning crime journalist Peter Lance provided new details into one of the least known unsolved murder cases in history: the brutal death of interior designer Eduardo Tirella, and the involvement of wealthy heiress Doris Duke. Lance recently received information from a 68-year-old man who claimed to have been Duke's paperboy in 1966, and at Rough Point the night of the supposed car accident that killed Tirella. The paperboy alleges to have heard a man and woman arguing, rapid acceleration of a car, the sound of a crash, and the voice of a man in distress, Lance reported, noting he saw the car smashed into a tree and Duke get out of it to look at Tirella's body. The paperboy asked Duke if she needed help and she screamed for him to leave the property, Lance added.