If you've always thought you were a wonderful singer, but somehow failed to produce your best in karaoke bars, scientists may have found a solution.
At last, some of the world's finest brains have gotten together to release the finest parts of everyone's brain.
Yes, soon you may be able to buy your own thinking cap, put it on, and be the person you always thought you could be.
The cap looks a little like a hairnet, but please don't let that put you off. The theory behind the incredible thinking cap is that it will be able to switch different parts of your brain on and off, thereby allowing specific parts of your gray matter to blossom to their full potential.
Scientists from the University of Sydney have studied brilliant people like Dustin Hoffman. Or, rather, brilliant people like the Qantas Airways-knowledgeable savant Dustin Hoffman plays in Rain Man.
Mirroring the way savants are both brilliant and mentally not quite there (remind you of any techies you know?), the thinking cap's scientific milliners use tiny magnetic pulses to either deaden a part of your brain or excite it beyond its normal level of stimulus, thereby allowing the excited part to reveal the full glory of its capabilities.
Professor Allan Snyder's optimism for your ability to, say, rumba like a Cuban while being an analyst for Mark Cuban, is boundless: "I believe that each of us has within us nonconscious machinery which can do extraordinary art, extraordinary memory, and extraordinary mathematical calculations."
Once the thinking cap buzzes experimentees up for 10 or 15 minutes, some are able to draw in a far more lifelike manner. Others, and this will please many at this site greatly, become far better editors, able to spot mistakes in a text that they could not see before the "OUT OF ORDER" sign has been hung on certain areas of their brains.
There is, however, a little bad news. The effects of the thinking-cap zap wear off after an hour. This might lead to some very unfortunate occurrences.
You've impressed someone over dinner with your ability to simultaneously sing hits from the '70s and balance a spoon on your nose. You go back to your place. The clock strikes midnight, the spoon falls off and, in the middle of some particularly apposite Barry Manilow rendition, you hit more bum notes than Britney Spears hits live.
But even this bad news might bring with it some good. The technique in the thinking-cap experiments, known as transcranial magnetic stimulation, also seems to be helpful in treating depression.
I am not an intelligent designer. Nor am I a resident of France or Switzerland.
But this Large Hadron Collider experiment, in which particles are breaking the speed limit somewhere beneath the French/Swiss border and then crashing into each other like teenage drunks in fairground bumper cars scares the semi-comatose bejaysus out of me.
These scientists claim to know what they are doing. But scientists always claim to know what they are doing. Then they discover, while doing the thing that they claim to know they are doing, that they are doing something entirely different.
Is any government monitoring these people? What if the Alps are suddenly sent into orbit by two particularly control-free particles and land square on top of, I don't know, Cleveland?
Alright, sometimes experiments do have excellent unintended consequences. But not often enough. Yugoslavia was an experiment. Look what happened to that.
The subatomic particles in their long tubes will be going at just this side of the speed of light and no one, but no one, knows what will happen when they enjoy their protonic fender-bender. It's all very well for Stephen Hawking to bet $100 that the supposed "God Particle' will not be found by this experiment. It's all very well for scientists to mock Professor Otto Rossler, who says that black holes will be created that will suck the earth away.
But let me tell you this. I have proof these scientists may be several wires short of a working plug. Before they began their descent into scientific instability, these people actually made a rap video.
In this rap they declare that this madness of theirs will "rock you in the head." They rumble on about anti-matter being "matter's evil twin." And in some twisted way, they seem to want to recreate the Big Bang that made everything other than the Partridge Family and the Palin Family.
These people are clearly on an insane quest for anti-matter, the so-called evil twin. They are like the antagonists in ConAir or A Beautiful Mind, the sort of folks who want to blow up the whole world and deny Russell Crowe an award.
Is no one prepared to put a leash on this crazyfest? The first collision is due in around thirty days. Please, look at that video. Don't they look like mad people to you? They're not a day over 25 and if you're telling me they're compos mentis, I'm telling you that Amy Winehouse is taking tea with Richard Dawkins next week.
Will someone not put a stop to this? I don't care if I'm made up of tiny little bits of string. I just want to be in one piece to watch the next Superbowl, the next series of Entourage and, although this is very ambitious, the Olympics live on the West Coast.
Techies, please help me here. Well, the sane ones amongst you, anyway.
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