wuB CannIbalism

About the author

I’m at the Future BNCI conference that I organized in Austria in 2010 with some European BCI practitioners. Drs. Thorsten Zander and Christa Neuper are prominent in front.

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wuB CannIbalism by Brendan zaChary allIson

“It’s not bullshit,” the scientist said in reply to my question. “They did it with worms. You teach worms to go through a maze, then feed them to other worms, and then those worms learn mazes more quickly. We worked out how to do this kind of transfer learning with human brains.”

“Yeah,” his wife said. “So they could learn by eating. Very American.” Bellies and breasts of the European investors in the room jiggled as they laughed and nodded sagaciously.

“Right. Americans will eat anything, especially if it’s deep fried and served with fatty sauce. We can grow and educate our brain donors at our offshore lab where there aren’t any laws. And after we remove their brains, we can grind up the rest of the donors to make the sauce!”

His wife giggled. “So Americans can finally learn more than one language or fashion or manners!” The audience roared.

“Nah, they don’t want any modest proposals,” he said. “The donors will just watch technical videos with Powerstreaming. Then people can eat their brains and Swiftly learn engineering. ”

I wasn’t going to invest in an idea like that without some proof. I ate both of those scientists’ brains and I don’t feel any smarter.

Author Commentary

Like “Better Recollections,” this is short-short written with love for a story from Philip K. Dick. “Better Recollections” honors the 1966 classic “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale,” which inspired the Total Recall movies. This story instead references “Beyond Lies the Wub,” which is discussed here.

I also have some shout-outs to “A Modest Proposal” by Jonathan Swift.

I lived abroad for many years and “enlightened racism” against Americans did annoy me, as apparent here.

This belief that worms can learn through cannibalism got a lot of attention. Look up McConnell flatworms. Later research showed that worms who ate untrained flatworms also learned more quickly.

This could very easily become a BCI-less story by removing Powerstreaming. The picture I included with that page was from the same Future BNCI conference in 2010.

Realism

This is as realistic as it is serious. In case that’s unclear: You can’t learn what someone else knows just by eating their brains. I suppose there’s a circuitous exception – if they knew how brains taste, and you previously didn’t…. never mind.

Hope

It would be awful if people resorted to brain cannibalism to learn what the victim knew. The idea that eating a brain would confer some of the victim’s personality traits was the basis for PKD’s original work, which is somewhat hopeful in the end.

Edit History

I wrote this in 2023 posted it in March 2024.

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