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Oh my, slow month much?
Topic Started: May 19 2010, 01:35 AM (1,721 Views)
Me
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Aspiring World Ruler and Eccentric Cynic
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Ooh! Kinda like a Wraith Queen, sorta. It's not exactly "them" because they basically take over your body and shove you to the back as long as you have Iratus DNA (Queens are UBER powerminds), but the principal of controlling multiple bodies as yourself is the same.

And their ships are called "hives"; and they support the lives of thousands of grunts!

Sorry. I shouldn't be posting this late.

But the mention of the being younger to cross wire the brains soz it adepts to be able to handle it (because as you said, being "growed up" wouldn't work) ... would that mean that if one of your counterparts were to die, the Ultra would die as well, since it's part of the mind unit and therefore.. part of their brain? I'm imagining that would be like cutting off part of your brain...maybe..
Edited by Me, Jul 23 2010, 08:00 AM.
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towr
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Defender of the pie
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They haven't aired of Star Gate Atlantis over here for me to comment on Wraith Queens.
Most sci-fi I know doesn't treat hive minds in the way I'm imagining it, though. There's a difference between controlling multiple bodies and being all of them.

Losing one of yourself in that situation would indeed be like losing part of your brain. But, a) people have survived and adapted to losing half of their brain (one case I know of is a young boy who had half of his brain removed to stop severe epilepsy; the other half grew in size and compensated for nearly all initial losses). And b) some brain functions would be body-specific (e.g. motor control and autonomous functions), and so their loss shouldn't affect the other body. One notable loss would be to your sensory input, you wouldn't be able to watch your own back anymore :P
I'm not sure the loss would be much more severe than in a split-brain patient (where the communication between the two brain hemispheres has been severed; which is sometimes done to treat severe epilepsy).

Of course, that raises the question of what would happen if you disrupted communication of the "hive" for an extended period of time. If the "parts" adapt to an individual lifestyle, could they merge into a whole again when the brains are reconnected? And meeting others of your former self would be almost as weird as your arms or legs suddenly having a will of their own.

Perhaps if one tried this experiment in mice, it would actually prove impossible to create a hive-mind. The brain might simply be opposed to developing in such a way. Even though the two halves of a brain naturally develop to cooperate, it may be crucial that they're part of the same physical body. So it could be that the most that you get out of connecting separate brains is something like telepathy. Or just dead mice.
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TheDeepDark
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Where light goes to die
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I dunno though. They have proven that the human mind is freakishly adaptable. At some point I might try to find online sources to back this all up but - I saw a, I think it was "Nova" special, on brain neurology. First they did this test with this guy who was born blind with his finger over a little pad that would have a series of braille letters press against his finger with increasing speed that he would try to identify. They then took an electrode and passed a low-current charge across the part of the brain identified normally with processing eyesight and ran the same test and his ability to identify the letters by touch dropped significantly. So the brain that never had eyes used that region for touch and senses that it could process. Cool.

But then:
They took an average person, taught them braille and ran the two-stage test. Not much difference in scores. Then they put them in eye coverings that completely blocked all light for three days and did the same set of tests (first just with the machine, second after "numbing" the part of the brain used for eyesight) and got a similar drop in score on the second test. The girl's brain had in THREE DAYS re-wired the section used for eyesight that it wasn't using to something that it was.

And then there was this kid I remember talking to my dad about who at a young age had some weird internal pressure against the underside of his brain and the doctors at first just said to watch carefully and if he started having any noticeable problems that they'd then have to try to stop whatever the problem was. They went back and followed up with the kid who functioned perfectly normally at 18 (wasn't top of his class, but in the upper 25%) and looked - He only had the outer ten or fifteen percent of his brain. The middle was just fluid, no grey matter. The brain just adjusted over time as it was happening and moved connections and different functions around where they weren't getting squeezed. Weird? Very. Cool? I sure think so.
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