What is the future of Fear?

In this piece, we are digressing from the physiology of the brain, to some of its daily use cases (say emotions).

So we are examining the future of human emotions that are strongly hormonal (chemical)- love, hate, fear.

Fear most of all — because it is ‘weaponized’ by humans the most. Examples:

• As hate, to view/to dehumanize others, to fight for abstract causes..
• As narrow walls in which to box our view points of the world
• Or just to sell more goods & services

Will the Need to keep ‘fear’ alive exists in the future human society?

Odds are yes.. simply because it will provide entertainment. But like a controlled VR game, it will likely be more regulated.

So we can now set the stage for a solution, a design of a future brain architecture, the problem space it is trying to address:

• Allows future humans to Love, not Hate.
• Learn continuously, experience the joys of learning which can happen best when the brain is in a ‘calm’ state, not spinning rapidly.
• Fear is to be experienced, but in a controlled way.
• Full freedom for individual expression: to choose how you look, to what your identity is (gender, preferences etc), WITHOUT having side effects- the brain has to cope.
• - Side effects ? Without having to feel guilty, feel negative, feel depressed about expressing one’s individuality.
• - The above requirement (to mitigate side effects, ‘feel good’ is being largely solved by chemicals- imperfectly).

The requirements list will no doubt be multiple pages long, and will include human interaction with other animal species (a whole new subject).

At xNeurals, our main topic of interest is Autism: the next set of thoughts will focus on how best to gear near-term solutions to help those amazing kids bring out their best… and to their silent warrior parents.