Evolutionary burst: TED Talk from Juan Enriquez

I just watched an interesting TED talk from Juan Enriquez about the evolution and how it may get a burst those days. It mixes both genetics and computer science to a level accessible to any public and it highlights many interesting trends like the idea that we will be able at some point to download our memory and personality into a machine.


Although I've thought that this will happens for years, I feel happy that "non geek" people start to take this idea as something that is not completely mad.

Another interesting point is the "overflow" of information that we are imposing to our brain. Even if I disagree on the "evolution" term (I'm quite sure this overflow could not have any incidence on the brain of our children), the adult brain may change a lot between a children exposed to the internet since he is born, and our grand-grand mother who was monitoring sheeps all day long for her entire life. Since the brain is a plastic structure that can adapt itself to cope with the information coming from our sensors, it is likely that feeding it with more complex information may create drastic changes in the way it processes it.

But obviously, if one wants to fully understand the (r)-evolution that is coming, his brain should be trained with as much information as possible.