Another Day in the Frontal Lobe
I have just finished Katrina Firlik's neurosurgery memoir, Another Day in the Frontal Lobe. It's a fun and friendly book about brain surgery, and all the things that can go right and wrong with your brain. It's also a book about how our health system works, including the impact of high malpractice premiums and how the system incentivizes lower risk, lifestyle medicine over lifesaving emergency surgery practice.
In the final chapter, the author discusses brainlifts, neurosurgery equivalent to cosmetic surgery today - for enhancement, not survival. One of the possibilities she discusses is implanting a chip whose electromagnetic pulses stimulate an area of the brain for enhanced function, whether it would weaken other function, etc. For example, might we one day be able to do a memory booster so that learning five languages is a piece of cake, but it might weaken your abilities or focus for another cognitive skill. Considering that language study has already weakened my focus on other things but I don't speak five languages fluently yet, might it be worth it? I'm not sure, but it raises issues for those of us in the polyglot community if 10 years down the line, multilingualism is a surgical procedure, not a lifestyle. Hmmm...
In the final chapter, the author discusses brainlifts, neurosurgery equivalent to cosmetic surgery today - for enhancement, not survival. One of the possibilities she discusses is implanting a chip whose electromagnetic pulses stimulate an area of the brain for enhanced function, whether it would weaken other function, etc. For example, might we one day be able to do a memory booster so that learning five languages is a piece of cake, but it might weaken your abilities or focus for another cognitive skill. Considering that language study has already weakened my focus on other things but I don't speak five languages fluently yet, might it be worth it? I'm not sure, but it raises issues for those of us in the polyglot community if 10 years down the line, multilingualism is a surgical procedure, not a lifestyle. Hmmm...
1 Comments:
Language learning is about fun. It is about he enjoyment of the language, of reading, listening and speaking in the language. There are no shortcuts, and I do not believe that operations will provide shortcuts, or at least they will eliminate the enjoyment of the language as a necessary step to getting there.
Post a Comment
Links to this post:
Create a Link
<< Home