week thirteen

the development of a bionic person?:

when i was three or so i got two lovely white mice. "girls." so i named them after two of my favorite people - me(!) and jamie sommers, the bionic woman. jenny and jamie turned out to be jenny and james, with a whole litter of baby mice. fortunately(?), that had no detrimental effect whatsoever on my devoted love for the bionic woman.

that fascination aside, i'm not so sure i support the development of a bionic person. what is that? an entire bionic person sounds like a robot. i do support the development of bionic replacements for people who have lost limbs or other body parts, like the bionic eye. what a wonderful use of science. i'm intrigued also by the use of bionic exoskeletons to be ideally used in specific tasks, like any other tool or machine and then removed. has some strange potential for misuse, but then i guess so does a chainsaw, staple gun or bulldozer...

anyway the whole bionics thing and the 70's tv shows, and sci-fi in general remind me of a line from my 5 year old friend andrew's favorite song: "anything your mind can see, you can manifest physically, without the thought there's no reality. the clock, the chair, the stereo, the fridge and the tv were once just someone else's thoughts. are you with me, are you with me..." imagine what we could be imagining!

rate "the control of artificial limbs by thought alone":

sounds very similar and in continuation with the bionics idea. i've heard more recently about using a person's own paralyzed limb with rewired brain controls. thought control of a person's own limb or limbs seems ideal, but where there's an amputation or other complications, it would be great to be able to use artificial limbs that way too. amazing that these kinds of developments are going on in some parts of the world and yet in others, people, often children, with legs blown off by land mines, are dragging themselves through the streets on pieces of cardboard. what a crazy, unbalanced world we live in. may we be moving toward wholeness and dynamic health for all.