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Two heads are proverbially better than one, so it’s no surprise that dedicated bands of researchers are working on putting this theory into real-life practice. The Elon Musk – or possibly the P.T. Barnum of the Second Brain Movement is Tiago Forte, whose book Building a Second Brain A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential has been a minor sensation among those for whom one human brain just isn’t enough.
The desirability of a second brain is predicated on the notion that not being able to remember everything we have learnt is a problem. One might argue that, on the contrary it has great benefits. Digital overload means we really do suffer from Too Much Information about things we don’t need to know simply because it is impossible to avoid exposure to unsolicited input, everywhere from pop-ups on our phones to digital billboard onslaughts at traffic lights.
What an idea like this needs, you may be thinking, is a catchy acronym and Forte doesn’t disappoint. CODE stands for Capture, Organise, Distil and Express. Some science-y sounding lingo would also be good: “We’re asking your biological brain to hand over the job of remembering to an external system, and by doing so, freeing it to absorb and integrate new knowledge in more creative ways. Your Second Brain is always on, has perfect memory, and can scale to any size.”
Forte’s Second Brain is “a combination study notebook, journal, personalised encyclopaedia, idea laboratory, and sketchbook”.
Or, to put it another way, it’s a notebook.
On close inspection, his $50 dollar book or his $1500 course requires you to get a note-taking app, such as Evernote or Microsoft OneNote, and chuck everything you see on it to look at later. It’s an online version of the commonplace book in which cultivated citizens recorded notions and phrases that took their fancy hundreds of years ago.
It doesn’t really make you smarter. It just makes it easier to disguise the fact you forget stuff.
No more annoying remembering, because it’s all written down!
But what of the other kind of second-brain wave? The future in which we can upload our consciousness to a great big computer and possibly live forever. How’s that going?
Not great.
It’s five years since start-up Nectome announced a path to eternal life that involved copying your brain. There was a drawback that most potential customers identified quite quickly –you had to be dead first. Or almost dead.
You would be connected, under general anaesthetic “to a heart-lung machine in order to pump its mix of scientific embalming chemicals into the big carotid arteries in their necks while they are still alive”. The company confirmed this process would be “100% fatal”. Later, you would be revived – fingers crossed – when the technology would exist to make a computer simulation of your brain.
Nectome’s website currently has a lot about “a mature science and technology of memory [that] could enable some truly revolutionary advances” and not so much about being embalmed while you’re still alive.
Google scientist and futurist Ray Kurzweil is more optimistic and less homicidal. He believes we will be able to make copies of brains by 2045. He was born in 1948, so he’s cutting it fine if he plans to benefit from this personally .
The real challenge in copying our brains is that they have around 86 billion neurons (nerve cells that send messages around the body) and trillions of connections between them that would have to be reproduced. So far, scientists have been able to copy the brain of a type of worm - C. elegans – that has about 300 neurons.
And there’s no guarantee that even a perfect copy would have anything like consciousness, because we still don’t know how consciousness works. It might be that something with all the physical qualities of a brain automatically generates consciousness, but no one knows.
The prospect has numerous dystopic downsides. Even if you could have your very own Brain-in-a-Box that you kept in a vault and that lasted long after your original body had decayed to dust, how much fun would you have with it?
The best prospects are that you’d have a replica body (pricey) or exist in some kind of virtual reality. As Business Insider reported disconsolately, this “would need high-fidelity sensors and systems to sense the world around them. Graphics, at least, are constantly improving, thanks to the speed and size of the video-game industry. It’s the rest of the senses that will need major work, everything from tasting a rum and Coke to feeling the pain of a car accident.”
As things stand and in the interests of your good health, it would appear that you’re best not to pin your hopes on getting a shiny new brain but to look after the one you’ve got: don’t smoke, drink or do other drugs, eat well, get plenty of exercise and sleep. It’s a no-brainer really.
