Containment by Christian Cantrell Read Free Book Online

method or combination of methods of human-computer interaction. By the time subjects were 12, they were at least twice as proficient as adults, and by the age of 14, children were able to perform complex tasks between 10 and 20 times more efficiently than any adult in the world.
    Nsonowa had proven that people who grew up with BCI technology could control machines as easily as their own limbs.
    She was able to make this key breakthrough because she understood the paradox inherent in the process of thinking about thought: you could only think about thought using your own thoughts which meant that you were unable to think about any forms of thought which were inconsistent with your own thinking. She talked about DNA as being alterable, but not adaptive, and about the more primitive parts of our brains as not having the luxury of being creative about things like breathing, fleeing, mating, etc. But the cerebral cortex (which contains the four lobes that BCIs concern themselves with) are magnificently adaptive, flexible, and malleable. The cerebral cortex represents nothing less than infinite potential. Humans are inherently and physically unable to imagine all the extraordinary gifts hidden inside their own heads. The only way to find them is to go looking.
    Arik's parents were familiar with Nsonowa's work, and therefore introduced him to BCIs at a very early age. The challenge fascinated Arik, and he and the computer mastered each other very quickly. Most of the training programs were in the form of games which Arik devoured, and by the age of six, he was more proficient with a computer than any adult in V1. At the age of 10, Arik began modifying the learning, acclimation, and adaptation algorithms, and by 12, his parents suspected he was several times more proficient with a BCI than anyone in human history. He was often asked how he did it, but Arik honestly didn't know. He understood how both the hardware and the software worked, but it was the organic part of the equation — his own brain — that he didn't understand. He described it to people as being able to punch a code into a keypad, but not actually being able to recite the sequence of numbers. The knowledge was stored in a part of his brain that conscious thought could not access directly.
    Arik's parents were also familiar enough with Nsonowa's work to stop Arik's research into building a two-way BCI. It didn't take Arik long to realize that once the process of a human communicating with a computer using a BCI was mastered, the bottleneck became the process of the computer communicating with the human. After processing input, the computer had to convert its output into some sort of graphical form which it normally displayed by exciting molecules of polymeth at specified X, Y, and Z coordinates. The X and Y coordinates were needed to arrange the output into a coherent pattern, and the Z coordinate specified the depth of the event which helped determine which wavelengths of light were allowed to escape, resulting in billions of possible colors. The photons then had to span the distance between the polymeth and Arik's eyes, strike the rods and cones of his retinas, and get converted into electrical impulses which were carried by the optical nerve to the visual cortex in the occipital lobe all the way in the back of his brain. It was only then that Arik could even begin the process of making sense of the visual input which, depending on the task, was done in one or more completely different parts of his brain.
    Arik imagined a far more efficient process of computer output. If a BCI could allow you to communicate with a computer more efficiently by bypassing primitive input methods, why not build a BCI that could bypass primitive output methods, as well? Why not skip the visual representation, the polymeth, and the eyes entirely, and send information directly into the brain? Nsonowa refused to do any work with two-way BCIs. She fit her own definition of wise in that she