Senseless Gods.
There are a couple of cases in medical history of children being born with little to no sensory perception. In the small amount of reading I’ve done on the topic it seems that most of these unlucky kids are blind and deaf (maybe very weak hearing in one ear) and because of this, a lack of brain development - in conjunction with whatever condition they started with - causes them to never really gain any of the lesser senses like taste and smell. Touch is much harder to get rid of though and it seems like they always retain at least that.
While I was reading about these kids I found myself thinking about a Japanese experiment I’d heard of a few years ago, in which using an MRI machine, a woman’s brainwaves were converted into electrical signals to control the movements of a robotic arm. The woman would make some simple hand gestures, and even though the only thing linking her to the robot were some small, wired sticky pads on her forehead, the arm mimed what she did.
Anyway the point I’m making is this… if we can read these brainwaves now and more importantly understand them enough to purposely reproduce and use them, maybe we can do the same robotic arm experiment in reverse.
These kids lead lives that none of us can begin to imagine. Closing your eyes and putting your fingers in your ears doesn’t really measure up. I read about one in particular who’d become a celebrity in his own right. He’d met with Obama, Al Gore, several movie stars, got rides in military tanks, had visited dozens of countries and had done enough other awesome stuff to make my life look sheltered and quaint. There’s a catch though.
We don’t actually know if he knew he was doing these things. In fact we don’t even know if he had any idea he was in a different place, or interacting with someone other than his parents. The boy had a few hand gestures to signify ideas like “I’m hungry” or “I have to go pee.” But he rarely used them, and when he did he often used them incorrectly.
This stems entirely from the fact that his brain was simply unable to develop to the standard level. Sensory input during the infant age is immeasurably important for mental maturity. And while we can wash them, and feed them, monitor their blood pressure, hold their hands and cut their hair we can never actually talk to them. And because of that we can never teach them - never help them grow into people. Who knows, maybe we can’t even make them conscious.
But what if we could?
Considering we had the technology (which I genuinely believe to be over the horizon somewhere) could we even figure out how to form thoughts they’d understand? Teach children who can’t see, hear, taste or smell? A part of me is skeptical, but that part of me is wrong a lot.
The thought occurred to me that if a process and syntax were developed to push images or thoughts to the front of a person’s awareness, and was implemented regularly for the entire fetal development, though the child may never use his senses, his mind could develop to something quite extraordinary and quite different than the norm.
Such a person would be devoid of distraction entirely. No spouse in the next room banging pots, children crying, no stopping a train of thought to stare at rain bead on a window. If a thought task was assigned to them, they would have the potential to devote a much higher percentage of brainpower to the task than a regular person.
And given this power, and years to use and hone it, were these people given the ability to talk back to us, through the miracle of this medium machine, the insight and ideas we’d receive from them would almost certainly blow our minds in one way or another.
I can’t begin to imagine what they’d say, or better yet, what our tiny, partitioned minds would scramble to respond with.
2 years ago