Brain Boost Button one step closer

In 1972 Orson Welles narrated a short documentary film, directed by Alex Grasshoff, based Alvin Toffler's book Future Shock.

In that film there is a man shown getting out of bed, groggily finding a 110VAC wall socket to jack-in his neural implant, and pressing a button with his thumb to charge up his cognitive co-processor brain implant for that day, the way many people feed their caffeine addiction every morning.

Now the Journal of Neural Engineering has published (Volume 9 Number 5; J. Neural Eng. 9 056012) Facilitation and restoration of cognitive function in primate prefrontal cortex by a neuroprosthesis that utilizes minicolumn-specific neural firing [PDF]. This is a simple brain implant to augment the brains processing power (currently in animal tests with monkeys), where there has been brain damage due to trauma or disease. It is the first small tentative step to the Brain Boost Button that Toffler warned us of being on the horizon in 1972...

How to keep a sharp focused mind, or How sugar makes you stupid

When designing Embedded Systems it is important to keep your mind sharp and focused.

A recently published study: 'Metabolic syndrome' in the brain: deficiency in omega-3 fatty acid exacerbates dysfunctions in insulin receptor signalling and cognition [PDF] shows that a high-fructose diet sabotages learning, memory.

Eureka Alert sums up the study in plan English as:

New study shows that a high-fructose diet makes you stupid, significantly inhibiting your brain's ability to learn and remember.

"Our findings illustrate that what you eat affects how you think," said Fernando Gomez-Pinilla, a professor of neurosurgery at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. "Eating a high-fructose diet over the long term alters your brain's ability to learn and remember information. But adding omega-3 fatty acids to your meals can help minimize the damage."

Do you think this perhaps this a conspiracy by 'Them' to keep us "Dumbed Down", as it is found in most off-the-shelf foods and drinks?

Personally I cut sugar out of my diet a long time ago, and became an avid reader of food ingredient labels, and feel a lot better for it.

Be warned, if you try to remove sugar from your died, you will soon discover just how addictive this substance in the typical diet really is, as I know first hand from when I stopped being a Doughnut Junkie. It was a miserable few weeks when I decided to go Cold Turkey on sugar. Once it is out of your system for a while, it does not take much for you to feel the effects, like all of your muscles starting to ache, of eating something that you did not expect to have sugar in it.

Always keep in mind you are what you absorb, no mater how good this poison to the mind tastes going down...