Wirehead Studios

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,290610,00.html


I suppose those who are proponents of the theory that large brains are required for human-level intelligence might find this a bit of a shock that someone could function relatively normally in this state.  Perhaps brain size is not so important as all that?  It does make me wonder why humans tote around all that extra brain matter if, as it would appear (and I've often said) it's not really necessary.  Wouldn't you get fewer neck cramps with smaller, more efficiently utilized brains I wonder?

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn12301-man-with-tiny-brain-shocks-doctors.html (http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn12301-man-with-tiny-brain-shocks-doctors.html)

I think it has something to do with what ICT-folks call the 20%-80%-rule. I've heard the man without a brain has an IQ of ~75, or so I'm told -- still, quite impressive.

Huh... I thought this was going to turn out to be a bush bashing thread...

anyway I'm not really surprised, I heard that most of the human brain is unused, granted it was a news story on theoretically implanting things like wings and tails onto a human being... but still...

This thing is old...
Actually we do use completly our brains but we use it at a very low level (like running a emulation of pong on a Pentium 4)

O rly? Yeah... I guess after listening to some news stories some people use their brains at much lower levels than others.

Pwnd. :]

You're assuming of course that the Pentium 4 can run the Pong emulation as efficiently as the original Pong machine ran itself.  If you know anything about the x86 instruction set and how a Pentium 4 actually operates, the Pong machine is superior.  Why?  Consider what the P4 Pong emulation has to deal with.  It's not just a pure emulation, you have the entire operating system running in the background, as well as supporting drivers and other system-related processes, plus the operating cost (in terms of heat and power consumption) of the hardware itself.  The Pong machine only has to do exactly what it was designed to do, and it actually does what it was designed to do (something modern operating systems have a problem with) and is about 1,000 times more efficient at doing it because it doesn't have to do anything else.  So if all you're concerned about is the efficiency with which you can run Pong, the original machine does it better despite the fact that it's way more primitive.  If you have any doubt of this, consider the fact that the original Pong machine ran on 4 D-cell batteries.  Try doing that with a P4. ;)

WHAT??? That's unbelievable that an arcade machine ran on batteries...

Hmm, I only remember seeing the home unit, which did indeed run on 4 D-cell batteries.  That there was an arcade version I find quite astounding.

I saw that in a documentary once, even. It started out as a pretty whacky 'arcade', that a few guys just set up in a bar. I also found this lovely picture of what they made out of it later:

(http://www.pong-story.com/pics/arcade/apong.jpg)

Now doesn't that look inviting?

Ha... I remember seeing something in an atari collection that if you hit the right screw on that cabinet you'll get free credits, or there's a way to zap it with static to not have to pay.

Looks like my pc

What I found most interesting about this article is that the lack of grey-matter didn't cause the man any down-time.  Most of the patients who recover from strokes or head trauma take a lot of time to recover the functionality once governed by now absent/dead portions of the brain.

Things like this make me wonder what we as a species are capable of if we used 100% of our brains at any given time.