A Modular Brain

This post originated in me wondering if humans like to kiss because the mouth is the part of the face, which perhaps is the part of the body most closely associated with our conscious self, the part of the mind where we mentally abide, our own internal living room  as it were (as if the face, including vision, were the primary window the conscious mind uses to connect to the world, whereas other means are more distant, like windows in a basement you can access but have to move your vantage point to do so). As opposed to your subconscious being more connected to other parts of your body, like your internal organs (things you can feel but normally are not aware of unless you are in pain, like your breathing or how your knee is operating, would occupy a boderline between the conscious and unconsious mind).

As I was thinking about this, an image of old Nintendo style game cartridges plugged into a human skull popped into my head, generating an idea that stemmed from that picture. What if it were possible to have a living human being with a modular brain, a plug & play system?

This is would be just one aspect of being a cyborg and is not really original to me. Perhaps possibly though it is original to think of writing a science ficiton story in which different parts of the brain could be mixed on a modular basis. So I could match the conscious mind of a human being with the limbs of an octopus. Or horse. Or an alien creature. Or a story could flip a subconscious so it operates machinery, while the conscious self perhaps believed it was still fully human. Or I could plug an alien conscious mind into human limbs, etc.

Or more narrowly, what if you could pick eagle eye input, bat sonar, and an elephant nose input to be fed into your brain? And the brain parts would be adapted in this form of plug & play to be able to process these unusual imputs and harmonize them into the whole system? Like a sort of mental USB that in these examples connected to exterior sensors?

What if wholly internal processes were subject to his same modularity? So you could adopt Vulcan logic as a plug-in and swap it out for a Klingon battle mindset when you needed it? (The possibilites would be endless.)

What if fine-tuning and customizing your own brain were a major industry of the future?

Whether this happened in some sort of cyberspace or in a futuristic cyborg reality would give nuances to what this story would actually be like. But I think writers usually think of our minds and or bodies becoming something else as a whole unit. Or more often, rather than trying to transform the way a human thinks in a story, they imagine what we would consider an ordinary human mind inside another kind of body--as if you could put your mind in a bear or a whale or something like that.

Imagine a story that did it differently. Where separate mental functions were plug & play and you swap them out as needed, as frequently as you wanted.  A modular brain.


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