Of late, there has been a ballooning blog storm on self-directed neuroplasticity (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, etc.), which has interesting implications in light of toposophy, which "deals with the theoretical problems and possibilities of attempts to extend and amplify one's mental potential." And the page, over at Orion's Arm, continues, "... most mental enhancement is incremental, involving merely adding on new capabilities and integrating them with the already existing framework. Typical cyborgisation procedures as memory enhancement, skill libraries, coprocessors, extended neural networks and pidgin lobes fall in this category. While such additions may cause mental shifts and re-evaluations of identity, they merely extend the basic architecture of the underlying mind. This kind of bootstrapping can be self-supporting, each improvement making it easier to add new improvements, producing an accelerating mental expansion, a singularity."

So the basic idea of recursive self-directed neuroplasticity can be broken down into a few key ingredients. First, we need synaptic plasticity from modern neuroscience. This includes your typical bunch of functions: long-term potentiation (LTP), long-term depression (LTD), spike timing dependent plasticity (STDP), and neural facilitation (short-term plasticity). These have a molecular basis.

And next in the recipe is the self-directionality, otherwise known as "attentional effort" and sometimes sustained attention. Many prominent physicists, philosophers, poets, mathematicians and others have commented on how insight works, such as Asimov, Poincare, Feynman, Tesla, Helmholtz, etc. "Incubation sometimes requires a very long break: Feynman noted that "You have to do six months of very hard work first and get all the components bumping around in your head, and then you have to be idle for a couple of weeks, and then - ping - it suddenly falls into place ..." (Csikszentmihalyi and Sawyer, 1995, p. 350)." So the incubation theory of insight and learning, especially in the opportunistic-assimilation hypothesis (failure indices left in LTM, retrieval from LTM to STM just gives the original problem space without the crappy stuff), can help mold neuroplasticity over a long period of time -- simply by directed attention, such as changing the cholinergic and GABAergic afferent/efferent inputs into the prefrontal cortex and the visual cortex. That starts to get into the neuroimaging sciences -- anybody have an fMRI machine that I can borrow? No, really.

Next is the recursive aspect of it all. As you learn, you can make more sense of it all, and then direct learning towards particular other tidbits; perhaps that's why I am so interested in focusing/attention -- it can lead to recursive self-improvement in the extropic transhuman sense.

It's interesting, really. You don't have to sit back and watch this all go to waste, since you can do scientific experimentation in your own home with neural slices. It's not too hard to get biopsies from biotech companies, then wire up the neural slices into electrode arrays, patch clamps, microfluidic systems, etc. Things get difficult with signal analysis, although I can't vouch on that front quite yet. And what we learn from training organotypical slices, or small patches of neurons in a dish, could tell us something more about our own plasticity. A good place to start would be here on that front. Next step is a cheap, nearly free neurochemical kit. The price of neurochemicals on chemcial supplies websites is way, way too high to do anything interesting with ($1/mg), so we're going to have to engineer bacteria to produce our neurotransmitters for us.

- Bryan