Our lazy, enterprising brains

Discover Magazine has a refreshing piece about how it is a good thing that we are delegating some of our mental brainpower to google searches. As the article explains,

Scientists have found that when test monkeys spent five minutes learning how to use a rake, some of the neurons in their hands began behaving in a new way. They began to fire in response to stimuli at the end of the rake, not on the monkey’s hand. Other neurons, in the brain, respond to things that appear to lie within arm’s reach. Training the monkeys to use the rakes caused these neurons to change—reacting to objects lying within rake’s reach rather than arm’s reach.

This is the optimistic approach to the future of brain-computer interfaces, and the preliminary evidence is fairly positive. Nevertheless, there will probably be many roadblocks ahead.