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Few Limits to What the Mind Can Imagine, Accomplish
YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio -- What was the stuff of science fiction has stirred the imaginations of scientists, especially physicists, and inspired them to transform most fantasies – travel faster-than-light and telekinesis excepted -- into reality.
The man who delivered this year’s Skeggs Lecture Thursday night, Michio Kaku, related how discoveries in physics, biology, psychology, cosmology and robotics have allowed scientists to overcome ignorance, repel superstition and improve the lives of humans, especially humans disabled by degenerative diseases or combat.
Kaku, professor of theoretical physics at City University of New York, an author of best-selling books on science, and who’s appeared often in documentaries on the Science Channel, spoke to a packed house at Stambaugh Auditorium last night and met with students from Youngstown State University yesterday afternoon.
While he dwelled on his latest book, The Future of the Mind (ranked No. 1 on The New York Times list of nonfiction hardcovers), he also discussed how scientists are working to fully develop Einstein’s dream, a “theory of everything,” as well as string theory (he is a co-founder of string field theory), telepathy and telekinesis, and the morality of experimenting with people’s brains to learn how their minds and memories work.
As he was growing up, Kaku said, he obtained his mother’s permission to make an atom smasher in the garage. Then he enlisted his parents to join him at his high school football field where they uncoiled the 22 miles of copper wire he had bought. The equipment he bought and worked on succeeded only in blowing every fuse in the Kakus’ house.
He also experimented with telekinesis – using only one’s mind to affect material objects – and found he couldn’t.
His interest in telekinesis and telepathy laid the foundation for his interest in the brain and the mind and how the brain, which generates at most 20 watts, has powered human intelligence.
“We have learned more about the brain in the last five to 10 years,” he said, than in the all the time before.
He lauded the initiative President Obama and the European Union have proposed, to spend $1 billion for Brain 2.0 or Connectome, to map the neural pathways that underlie how the human brain works. It’s the next logical step, he said, now that the human genome has been mapped.
Brain 2.0 has the potential to lead to a cure for mental illness, Kaku said, noting that 15% of humanity suffers from some form of mental illness sometime during their lives.
It could lead to a “brain pacemaker for Alzheimer’s patients,” he said.
The mapping could also lead to the building of exoskeletons for humans who suffer from neurological diseases or have lost limbs in combat. Those equipped with exoskeletons could use their minds to operate their arms and legs, feet and hands such they would be no different from the fully able-bodied, whether picking up an egg or drawing a picture.
The brain is wetware – a biological takeoff on hardware – and the mind is software. Surgeons could insert chips into the brain, Kaku suggested, to activate the mind’s software in a BMI – Brain Machine Interface.
Surgeons at Brown University have implanted chips into the brains of totally paralyzed people and this allows them to lead somewhat normal lives. A man there can, simply with his mind instructing his laptop, maneuver his wheelchair.
The Wounded Warrior program sponsored by the Pentagon is working with Johns Hopkins University to restore as much function as possible to soldiers and Marines who lost limbs, sight and hearing while serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. These combat veterans have partial exoskeletons, Kaku said. “Complete exoskeletons are next,” he predicted.
As more is learned about the brain, physicists are playing a leading role in understanding what consciousness is and consists of. People with phenomenal memories, often called savants, turn out to be unable to forget. “The brain’s erase mechanism is broken,” Kaku said. The have forgotten how to forget.”
Some of the men regarded as scientific geniuses, such as Sir Isaac Newton and Paul Durac, suffered from a form of autism, Asperger’s Syndrome, Kaku said, where they made brilliant discoveries but were extremely awkward socially, loners and unable to relate to women.
Scientists are also learning how other animals, especially our pets, think. Their research has found that jokes about animal behavior turn out to be true. For example, when a human comes home and a cat comes up to greet him, rubbing its head against his leg and purring, it’s not so much the cat is glad to see the human as it’s rubbing its scent into the leg and claiming ownership of the person who feeds it. “That’s my human,” it’s saying as it retreats because cats are loners and solitary hunters.
A dog, on the other hand, is a descendent of social animals that live and hunt in packs. Puppies see people as big dogs and the humans who care for them as alpha dogs.
Turning to robotics, Kaku pointed out how different they are from human and the gulf between human intelligence and artificial intelligence. The best combination is individual workers controlling robots, where from a distance of a few feet or from earth into deep space.
Robots are ideally suited for cleaning up nuclear power plant accidents, Kaku pointed out, and traveling into outer space where humans exposed to radiation and muscle deterioration are only the beginning of the hazards.
In discussing string theory with the YSU students, Kaku noted that the mathematics require 11 dimensions of hyperspace while our world can sense only four, time being the fourth. Most have difficulty comprehending 11 dimensions, he allowed, and told of how, when he was a boy, he and his family would go to a Japanese teahouse where fish swam in nearby pools.
The fish could travel only straight, right or left. They were incapable swimming up or down, Kaku recalled. He thought to himself, “What’s it like to be a fish?” If a human pulled one out of the water, the fish – if it could think such a thought – would be surprised at being pulled into a third dimension, up. It would also learn that a being doesn’t need fins to move about and water to breathe.
“Today we physicists suspect, but cannot prove, we are the fish,” Kaku said.
Copyright 2014 The Business Journal, Youngstown, Ohio.
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