I believe you misheard. Those rat brain cells were harvested from dead rats, and they were stating how they died.... AtE-TeR-MiN-Ex! AtE-TeR-MiN-Ex!

You mean it's not supposed to be like that? Man, I should really stop throwing my Playstation 2 against the wall when I fail missions and stop using my game disks as coasters for ceramic mugs.

Hey eLaFER, have you seen fluffy?

evil, Lying and Flesh Eating Robot: No. ...

Hmm. That name makes me think of a robotic flesh eating Joker character. "Why so delicious?"

Ya know, the unemployment rate is bad enough right now without ghosts taking jobs from living writers.

But, how would they feel if the living started haunting each other? Turnabout is fair play. Oh wait, we do... it's called stalking.

Zap: "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is spongy and bruised."

I just noticed something a little disturbing about that webpage. Did you notice that under the NBC logo it says "is furious about playstation piracy"

We're not furious at the piracy, we're furious at how the DMCA is being used to throw people in jail for 10 years for modifying other's hardware with permission. He was not arrested for piracy...

I'm sure they're furious on the inside. Either that or they didn't RTFA.

Messing with a pompous CEO - Priceless (but free with coupon code!)

Bus Driver: Well, not me personally but a guy I know. Him and her *got it on*. Wooo-eee!

Billy Madison: No, they didn't.

Bus Driver: No, no, no they didn't. But you could imagine what it'd be like if they did, right...? Everybody on, good, great, grand, wonderful. No yelling on the bus!

pizza.... french fries.... pizza.... french fries....

The lion wouldn't know you. Perhaps if it did...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cvCjyWp3rEk

nuff said.

Dogs look at you and think "you feed me, you clean me, you pick up after me... you must be god!"
Cats look at you and think "you feed me, you clean me, you pick up after me... I must be god!"

Perhaps some people have an easier time becoming immersed in a game. I've played a number of games that allowed me to become immersed in them (mostly RPGs, and a few from other genres), and essentially identify myself with the main character.

They don't necessarily need great graphics, or sound for that matter. They need storyline and character development. They need relatively smooth gameplay, with very few and short delays. The control scheme needs to be such that after a while it becomes transparent... almost a reflex. If you have to think about how you need to use the controller to do a specific task even after hours of gameplay, I'd say the developer failed on the controls. Removing external distraction helps in becoming immersed as well.

You should try to feel like a character in a game. It may enhance the experience for you. Yes, we know you is where your consciousness lives, but wouldn't it be nice to let it visit another time and place once in a while? If not, why are you playing the game when you're life is obviously more exciting than it?

Noooo! It's all lies! Bathrooms are there for fully clothed bathing, brushing teeth and decoration only! I feel my mind corrupting! Make it stop! I know...

Whew.... that was a close one.

If you just think of the bits stored in the brain, perhaps you'd overestimate the pure storage of it due to the brains automatic decompression (by the methods listed in parent post) of the data. The link to geocities seems like it may overestimate due to the assumption that all synapse junctions represent 8 bits (256 levels) of *recoverable* data (though they give the possibility of storage at the molecular level). It also does not distinguish parts of the brain that can possibly store data with parts that have more a computational purpose.

Perhaps we should use an estimate by studying how much data with extremely low entropy/redundancy someone can memorize. 83,431 digits of pi were recited by Akira Haraguchi. Each digit is worth essentially 3.3 bits, so that makes it around 275000 bits. Of course, he knows a lot more than just the digits of pi, but that's how much "brain space" he was able to "allocate" to memorizing pi.

Perhaps if we could determine the average number of memories a person can remember and the average bits to store the average memory (compressed, of course), then we could come up with another estimate. Though this would ignore any type of specialized memory.

But really, I have no idea. Of course, if you don't care about recovering data with any type of speed then you could store everything as just an array of atoms or subatomic particles.

As for the doors and doorknobs example, are you sure the toddler never watched you use a door before they got to try it? Learning by imitation (which seems innate) is a powerful thing. I think AI research will keep bootstrapping along, but the development of true AI does seem like a rather impossible goal. How would you program consciousness anyway? Could it ever truly be conscious/sentient? Then again... are we just complex computers? What is our subconscious doing? Perhaps it is more like a machine interpreting code than we think. And perhaps *SEGMENTATION FAULT*