Thursday, March 6, 2008

Proto-Snow-Crash

Snow Crash reminded me of a story from an old AI book called "The Mind's I", where Daniel Dennet and Douglas Hofstadter set out to argue for the fundamentally mechanical nature of the human mind. They go about this by re-publishing a scattering of articles, essays and fictions, along with their accompanying notes. One of these stores is "The Riddle of the Universe and Its Solution", which describes a mental virus with effects similar to Snow Crash.

Although viruses that induce catatonia, unconsciousness or even brain death in the observer sound like science-fiction, we do have the strange precedent of visually-induced epilepsy, which seems to be a remarkably similar phenomenon. By looking at brightly flashing colors, seizures (electrical thunderstorms in the brain) can be induced in people — the most famous case being a Japanese cartoon that caused 685 children (reportedly) across the country to seize. That sounds an awful lot like a kind of snow crash to me. The fact that the human brain can "reboot" after such an electrical storm is a testament to its resilience, but that epilepsy can be induced through sight is worrisome regardless.

No comments: