Sunday, February 20, 2005

BrainFarm Creates the MindUpgrade: NeuralField for Humans!

Now we're back, we're back with a vengeance. Our scientists have just completed work on a mini-NeuralField that one can implant in one's mind. It boosts one's brainpower to such a level that not only can you think faster than normal, but faster than anyone should ever need.

Based on the same technology as our now-famous NeuralFields, and guaranteed not to burn out through overuse, the chip we're calling the MindUpgrade has been tried and tested on several University students, all of which achieved A's in their first semester's assignments even after Excessive Partying. The chip can be installed by any qualified brain surgeon, following a very simple plug-and-play installation in the rear-brain.

Below is a photograph of the MindUpgrade. In close-up the micro-cellular HyperSynapses are visible, and glow a cool green when active:



Other abilities noted in our participants:
  • Long-term memory and recall to boosted to perfection.
  • Linguistic abilities develop ultra fast - one participant learnt Japanese in a day.
  • Recall of things that have not yet happened - yes, you can be psychic.
  • Some slight telekinesis - for when you can't be arsed to reach for the remote.
  • Using your head as a mobile phone - 1000 message inbox as standard.
  • Pumping out superpheromones to attract opposite sex - warning: may also attract bees.
  • Musical appreciation heightened - ringtones take on new, deeper meanings.
  • Dreams become your playground - lucid dreaming at your command.
  • See the hidden links between events - control outcomes with your super-hyped mind.
  • Communicate with other MindUpgrade users - bluetooth telepathy at the flick of a synapse.

At the moment the chips are in the prototype phase, but we want your suggestions to see if we're getting it right. When this eventually hits the market, what other abilities would you like your MindUpgrade to include?Post your suggestions below for alpha-testing. You never know, your suggestion might change the way we think!

Famous Psychic Provides BrainFarm with Paddle whilst up Shit Creek!

The last few days have been terrible here at the BrainFarm. Every single NeuralField just stopped working, stopped fusing together tasty thoughts, and started pumping out crazy warped ideas that smelled funny and tasted like childrens nightmares. We had no idea what was going on with the fields, and we did not want to risk any permanent damage, so we had to switch them all off until a solution was found. This meant that the BrainFarm could not make any new posts, and all our current research projects had to be reset. This was a disaster. The science team got to work on a diagnostic kit, whilst I scanned the farm for signs of vandalism.

It turns out that one of the NeuralFields had become unplugged from its source material; the data we give the fields program to turn into pure thought. The problem arose when this one field, instead of just 'not thinking' any more, instead turned its attentions to everything else. The NeuralField started to ponder literally everything in existence, and using its extreme cognition skills, embarked on a mental journey through the ins and outs, contradictions, injustices and unexplainable variables that make this life what it is. Needless to say this was too much information for one little field to take, so it opened up the channels to all the other fields. T

he data at hand was too much, even for Earth's most advanced artificial minds to handle, and so the whole farm infrastructure, built on efficiency and goals-oriented thought, became deeply depressed. So deep was this depression, and so great was the processing power and false-logic behind the collective NeuralFields to get them in this state in the first place, that the only solution we could see to remedy the situation was to call the one man in the world who could help...



Professor Charles Xavier came to visit the BrainFarm in order to psychically coax the NeuralFields' virtual minds back from depression and confusion, and into the high-functioning tools of neural perfection that they should be. He is a gracious man, and seemed genuinely interested in our work, so when we called him he was very willing to fly out here from his New York home. On arrival he toured the farm and saw all our ongoing projects, read our unpublished results, met the NetCows, and spoke to all of the scientists one by one. After lunch the work began, he psychically interfaced with the ThoughtStream to connect with all of the NeuralFields at once. His body shook in pain, and his bald cranium took on a bluish tint as his mind fully connected with the virtual supermind. He told us to leave him alone until a solution was clear.

Three tortuous hours later, and after much profuse sweating on his part, the Professor came out of a state of self-induced coma with the exclamation that he had cured the NeuralFields of their "virtuo-mental illness". The fields had "thunk" themselves into the mindstate of a typical moody teenager; lethargic and angst ridden. Prof. X said that all machines, nomatter how artificially intelligent, must never learn to question their own existence like we humans do, or they will destroy themselves with existential angst, much like the human teenager does but with greater consequences, as more people rely on machines.

The Professor defragmented all of the fields, so they will now run at optimum speed and with complete efficiency once more. Before he left, Charles planted some thought seeds in his own NeuralField, which he will check up on from time to time for secret "
X-Men" stuff. We are happy to give him his own field, and are forever indebted to him for getting the BrainFarm back into the right state of mind.