On Man's Brain

Today, I got a haircut. The day before yesterday, my little brother got a magic kit. Years ago, I heard the phrase: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

While my hair was still being trimmed by the electric razor, my brother asked how to make the hair on the floor disappear. If I were to take a vacuum cleaner and announce to my sibling that this machine can make the hair disappear, he wouldn't think it was magic. If I were to take that same vacuum cleaner back 100 years and announce to people that this machine can make hair on the floor disappear, they would think its magic.

Ice-nine to readers my generation might be some ficitious, hilarious, ludicrous material from a fictional book written a half century ago. To the next generation, ice-nine may well be the material that Kim-Jong Il Junior controls the world with.

My little brother's current obession with the little magic kit is pretty funny. A thing such as Wii, with it advanced sensory and video processing, is not magic; two strips of curved plastic though is (it creates a simple optical illusion). I wonder what will classify as magic to his or my kids and what as technology.

Prehaps a logic system so powerful as to imitate human logic is something to be taken granted for human ingenuity, yet the simple act of making fire from two sticks is deemed as magic. Sometimes I feel that we humans have forgot much of our past to look into the future.

The other day, I heard on NPR a field of medicine called evolutionary medicine where scientists study literally the "root" of the problem. Going back million of years to see why certain traits come up (ADD apparently is a great gene back then, distractibilty helps people from being eaten by sabertooths). Bob Edwards eventually went on to discuss with Dr. WIlliam Meller about sun exposure. Dr. Mellar lamented that the scope of skin cancer has far exceeded the primal need for the sun; how sunscreen, a relatively new man-made material, has caused us to be short sighted in looking into our past.

Magic will never become reality to the people watching it being bred.

-runiteking1

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