We cannot even predict what kinds of emergent properties would appear when animals begin interacting as part of a brain-net. In theory, you could imagine that a combination of brains could provide solutions that individual brains cannot achieve by themselves.
Interpretation
The quote suggests that interconnected brains can produce insights and solutions beyond individual capabilities.
Miguel Nicolelis emphasizes the potential of collaboration among brains, likening their interaction to a 'brain-net'. This concept suggests that the emergent properties that arise from collective thinking and sharing of perspectives can lead to innovative solutions that might not be accessible to solitary thinking. It highlights the power of teamwork and interconnectedness in problem-solving.
In practice
In a team meeting discussing complex projects, this quote can illustrate the importance of collaboration.
Even two of humanity's most intimate possessions - a sense of self and a body image - are fluid, highly modifiable creations of the brain's mischievous deployment of electricity and a handful of chemicals. They both can change or be changed on less than a second's notice.
It's the first time an exoskeleton has been controlled by brain activity and offered feedback to the patients. Doing a demonstration in a stadium is something very much outside our routine in robotics. It's never been done before.
We want to galvanize people's imaginations. With enough political will and investment, we could make wheelchairs obsolete.
With its billions of interconnected neurons, whose interactions change from millisecond to millisecond, the human brain is an archetypal complex system.
Medicine is a science of uncertainty and an art of probability.
We carry stores of DNA in our nuclei that may have come in, at one time or another, from the fusion of ancestral cells and the linking of ancestral organisms in symbiosis. Our genomes are catalogues of instructions from all kinds of sources in nature, filed for all kinds of contingencies.
Science is organized common sense where many a beautiful theory was killed by an ugly fact.
If we examine the accomplishments of man in his most advanced endeavors, in theory and in practice, we find that the cell has done all this long before him, with greater resourcefulness and much greater efficiency.
I am a futurist, projecting trends in science into the next decades and century, but ironically my two daughters - one is a neuroscientist and the other is a pastry chef - tell me that my taste in music is positively prehistoric.
The nuclear industry has this amazing record, even equipment from generations one and two. But nuclear mishaps tend to come in these big events - Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and now Fukushima - so it's more visible.
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