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Geneforge effect


Brock The Archmage
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It is said that at any given time, a person only ever use between 10 and 20 % of their mind's potential. This makes me wonder if what the GeneForge is doing is simply unlocking more of your mind, which makes you more effective overall but makes individual parts of your brain, like the emotional center, less effective. The same 10-20% applies to the body as well. The best athlete you have ever seen is giving maybe as much as 20%, so a canister that makes you stronger goes over this limit. However, the reason this limit exists is using too much can cause severe damage, so what happens when a person uses 1000 canisters? heh.

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I have not studied neuroscience... however, I would tend to think that the brain is grown in full form for the potential of all possible mental activities... and the extent to which one chooses to generate neurological networks for the purpose of exercising this mental potential -- and which areas they choose to develop -- is then up to them. (And you cannot choose to develop all of it: you must choose.)

 

When you exercise your mental resources for whatever end, your brain grows neurons. While artists will have extended networks in one part of their brain, athletes will show developement in another. Cabdrivers have been shown to have extended networks developed in the area that governs our internal map-making ability.

 

So our capacity is ultimately governed not by the brain material itself but by the networks.

 

Now... in terms of actual "untapped potential", this really seems like the same sort of situation where you have a lot of wilderness that has been broadly developed for, say, housing development or oil production or whatever. Sure, you can say that 95% of that area is wilderness, but only if you consider small spatterings of wood to be wilderness.

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Originally Posted By: Brock The Archmage
Well if they are support structures serving as stabilizers, it would convert them to active, and you hvae to admit canister users are unstable. Oh well, bad idea I guess.


That'd be like replacing all your bones with muscles: it wouldn't make you stronger at all, it'd just make you much, much floppier. The supporting cells are there because they perform essential functions.
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Originally Posted By: Brock The Archmage
It is said that at any given time, a person only ever use between 10 and 20 % of their mind's potential.

I've heard it's as low as 5%. Considering the way some people drive, however, I'd say even that would be an overestimate.
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This five percent only refer to people nowadays, since our society enforces specializing in only a narrow particular field. And the other reasons are we entrust our daily activities to machines more and more (calculators, computers ...) and we are taught to react to the surrounding environment (and situations) based solely on our experience. Therefore majority of people have no need to think.

It is a proven fact that all natural systems "submit" to the principle of minimum action (or tend to be in the ground energy state). Therefore parts of people's brains that are not in use for some time become idle.

But when an openminded person is facing a totally new challenge, their brain activity increases; especially given the challenge is all-around.

Does anyone get what I mean? smile

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But more and more, each generation's youth are being trained to deal with increasing amounts of information and learn how to sort it all out and to multi-task (and research) more effectively. I don't see it as less thought, I see it as a different style of thought. Older people are not as well trained to deal with the increasing flood of information, so I think a lot of them tend to retreat and keep to what's comfortable to them.

 

I think that in a few years I'm going to start noticing that my 3 nieces have developed and are developing thinking patterns that I cannot compete with. Of course, the trade-off, I suppose, is a reduced ability to focus.

 

I've never been any good at focusing, myself. My father's much better at it.

 

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Speaking of old people. There was a long-term study that finished recently, where they put old people (80 or so) into two groups. The first one was just a control group (did everything normal), but in the second group they started learning a new language (the one they haven't learned before). And after some time they withnesed that at the second group of people their brains grew and their brain cells multiplied much more rapidly. And also, at least some of them learned to speak a language fluently.

And there are also cases when 80-year-old people learnedto use a computer like kids and ever learned how to write programmers code.

And no, these are no miracles, every person is capable of doing it, it just depends on the will of a person (and perhaps it also helps to be open-minded, which, frankly, a lot of people today are not).

And you also used the word "trained" and "multi-task".

When training in something, your brains are very active, but when coming into a situation where you can react solely by "trainmed" reactions, your brain tends to not become very active at all. Your brain activity increases by a lot only when you are faced with a new situation and even then only when you start to think in new ways (in those you haven't before). That's again very evident by older people. Those who don't use their brain a lot they quickly lose the ability to function or even increase their chances to get dementias and such. But on the other hand people who are very active, they don't exhibit such attributes, or at least to a very lesser extent. A good example is my grandmothers friend, who is well over eighty, but she still teaches, sings, writes new songs, has recently started a shift in eating habits ... does a lot of new things. And when you talk to her, it's as if you were talking to a thirty-year-old.

And about multi-task - what did you mean by that, what sort of tasks?

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  • 2 weeks later...
Originally Posted By: Evnissyen
But more and more, each generation's youth are being trained to deal with increasing amounts of information and learn how to sort it all out and to multi-task (and research) more effectively. I don't see it as less thought, I see it as a different style of thought. Older people are not as well trained to deal with the increasing flood of information, so I think a lot of them tend to retreat and keep to what's comfortable to them.


Interestingly enough it's mentioned in G1 that student shapers are taught/trained to absorb and deal with large amounts of data quickly - before they learn any cool magical stuff.
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