Just watched an episode of ‘Through the Wormhole’ with Morgan Freeman. An interesting thing about that is this: since I’m not actually a scientist myself, Morgan Freeman’s voice carries the same level of authority with me as does Neil deGrasse Tyson or Michio Kaku, even though I know he is only an actor and they are actually scientists.
This isn’t a terribly dangerous thing because Morgan Freeman (who is probably a reasonably intelligent guy, I’m not dissing Morgan Freeman) is reading from a script, and the shows writers probably do have serious scientists among them.
The phenomenon manifests itself in other ways as well, though. For instance, somebody who is stupider than Donald Trump (Yes, they exist) has no way of knowing who is smarter, Donald Trump or a bag of poop, because they both seem smart to them.
But, I digress. The theme of the program was the brain, autism, monosavants, stuff like that. They were hooking up electrodes to peoples heads to stimulate certain parts of the brain to see if they could enhance creativity. They could.
They talked a bit about how this could be applied. Maybe people could learn faster, and get better grades in school,for instance, or learn how to play a musical instrument without years of practice.
I felt they were missing the point. Why not hook this thinking cap device up to a bunch of scientists, engineers, college students and science fiction fans, a few thousand of them, and start brainstorming about how to get clean water to everybody on Earth, or how to build a space elevator, or how to stop global warming? How about adding a control group who are microdosing on LSD? What the hell, throw it all into the mix.
Of course, having intelligent solutions to our problems is only have the battle. Getting the great ideas implemented, within our current system which is ruled by short term greed and pig ignorance, will be the hard part. But having great ideas would be a good start. You can’t have too many good ideas.
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