Ramez Naam Quotes

Replacing human vision is more than just a tool: we need to understand how that affects the brain.

Mediums change you by their very existence. They do this on fundamental levels because they force you to favour certain parts of your brain over others.

The act of learning to read added an entirely new circuit to our hominid brain's repertoire. The long developmental process of learning to read deeply changed the very structure of that circuit's connections, which rewired the brain, which transformed the nature of human thought.

We treat human biology as our center point. Everyone already has a head-mounted display. It's your head!

Whatever you train, you change your brain.

The U.S. has spent billions of dollars on educating and supporting teachers or developing curricula but no resources are applied to 'improving the brain' that a student brings to the classroom.

Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence.

We are beginning to see intimations of this in the implantation of computer devices into the human body.

Andy Clark refers to humans as 'natural-born cyborgs.' What he means is that we habitually extend and change our body-concept without even thinking twice about it.

Neuroplasticity research showed that the brain changes its very structure with each different activity it performs, perfecting its circuits so it is better suited to the task at hand.

All of imagination - everything that we think, we feel, we sense - comes through the human brain. And once we create new patterns in this brain, once we shape the brain in a new way, it never returns to its original shape.

When you talk to a human in 2035, you'll be talking to someone that's a combination of biological and non-biological intelligence.

By the time we get to the 2040s, we'll be able to multiply human intelligence a billionfold. That will be a profound change that's singular in nature. Computers are going to keep getting smaller and smaller. Ultimately, they will go inside our bodies and brains and make us healthier, make us smarter.

As someone who was basically a software engineer for many years, I became fascinated with how the brain functions and is put together and works in such a different fashion than computers do.

The brain is plastic its whole life span.

When people play action games, they're changing the brain's pathway responsible for visual processing. These games push the human visual system to the limits, and the brain adapts to it.

I grew up using maps and having a sense of direction, and now I have a phone. I used to try to remember numbers, and now I... can just call them up instantly. And that's great. But what's happening right now is that we're in a phase of human evolution where we're merging with machines.

By removing the obstacles that have built up over time, you can grow your brain from baseline to super brain.

In my books the technology that I choose to talk about has to serve the themes. What that means is that I end up having to cut out a lot of cool technology that would be really fun to describe and play with, but which would just confuse everybody. So in 'Amped,' I focus on neural implants.

I've always been fascinated by the brain. I wrote a lot about brain-tech in my first non-fiction book, 'More Than Human.' So when I decided to write science fiction, that was the technology I gravitated towards.

I first got interested in the brain through computers.

As a programmer, you're working with very simple structures compared to the brain. So I was always fascinated by how the brain works.

Ultimately, it's not going to be about man versus machine. It is going to be about man with machines.

Your brain forms roughly 10,000 new cells every day, but unless they hook up to preexisting cells with strong memories, they die. Serves them right.

As a college student, what really interested me was the human brain and human intelligence.