Braaaaiiins

I was pleased to learn that the Obama administration is dedicating significant funding to the study of the human brain. If you ask me, the brain, along with the deep ocean, are the last two places on Earth left to explore.

When you consider that researchers have just "connected" the brains of two rats (read the article here), you can see how we are only at the beginning stages of what, most likely, will turn out to be a new stage of awareness. The article points out that neither rat was necessarily aware of the other rat, only their thoughts.

"[A]n intercontinental mind-meld represents something new: a brain-to-brain interface between two live rats — one that enables realtime sharing of sensorimotor information. It's a scientific first, and while it's not telepathy, per se, it's certainly something close. Neither rat was necessarily aware of the other's existence, for example, but it's clear that their minds were, in fact, communicating. "It's not the Borg," Nicolelis tells Nature's Ed Yong. What he has created, he says, is "a new central nervous system made of two brains."

The only logical next step is making one brain "aware" of the other. Given this, instead of being solely self-aware, humans are on their way to becoming multi-self-aware. Pretty wild stuff.