Chapter 3 - Cybernetic RAM Upgrade

Total Recall - The Ultimate Weapon

Remembering the face of the enemy

So far, we have discussed some key terms and very powerful concepts, but you might have found it hard to take the preceding material and apply it immediately to your life. We will dispense with strategic thinking for a moment, and return to it at a later time. In this chapter, I want to show you something more substantial and easier to use right now. Let me provide you with the tactical edge of memory enhancement.

The importance of memory in school is an extremely controversial topic. Most teachers tend to play down its importance, while proponents of memory skills insist otherwise. Yet it should be obvious that without good memory, it would be virtually impossible to perform well in school, or elsewhere.

If a student forgets the information learned in class, he or she will not be able to answer the questions on a test or exam. It’s that simple. In other areas of life, the ability to remember something - the name of a person, for example - could determine the outcome of a business deal, or a social interaction. The advantages of better memory usage are so important, that if you read nothing else in this book except this chapter, your performance in school - and other areas of life - will still be dramatically improved. Enhanced memory capacity is like a plasma rifle - more precisely: “A phased plasma rifle in the 40-watt range.” - in our war against the obstacles preventing us from peak achievement.

Sequential Access - The Basic Technique

Turning abstract concepts into more tangible ones

What’s a plasma rifle, you ask? It’s a high-tech weapon that any self-respecting cyborg would have in his arsenal. When you want to terminate something, the way to go is to blow 'em up with a plasma rifle. You probably already know what a rifle is, but what is plasma? Most people might not have come across that word. Here’s the textbook definition:

A gas consisting of ionized atoms and electrons.

So what does “ionized” mean? Here’s another definition:

An ion is an atom that has become electrically charged by the gain or loss of one or more electrons.

Therefore, “plasma” is electrically-charged gas, and a “plasma rifle” shoots a “bullet” of this electrically-charged gas at an enemy.

Now that you sort of know what plasma is, suppose you had to remember it for an astronomy exam. How can you guarantee that you will remember what plasma is? You will have to remember all those other names of planets and stars, and who Plato was (remember him from the preceding chapter?) and why Copernicus was so great. In fact, with the myriad of information on the subject of astronomy, the definition of “plasma” might somehow evade you when you come across that question on the exam. But never fear, just picture the following image in your mind:

Your plastic mother, is eating a bowl of batteries, and she burps and says “Excuse me.”

Now isn’t that strange? Let’s try again to envision what is happening in that scene. Really picture your own mother, now made of plastic - imagine her bouncing around, with coiled telephone cord for hair - sitting down eating a gigantic bowl of AA-sized batteries (with or without the Energizer Rabbit for company) , chewing on the metal (with a sickening sound), and then burping in front of you!

Now here’s the meaning of that silly image:

Plastic Mother = Plasma
Giant Battery = Electrically-Charged
Burp = Gas

So now you remember that plasma (plastic mother) is electrically-charged (batteries) gas (burping).

This image will long endure in your mind. If I ask you what plasma is one year from now, you will probably still remember it. The reason why this method is so much more effective than rote memorization is because your mind is specialized to remember strange and unusual things. It does not function well in remembering boring and dull material.

You can observe this fact yourself. If you try to remember what you’ve done in your lifetime, I doubt you will remember exactly each and every footstep you’ve ever taken, or how many times you breathed yesterday, or even the colour of the shoes of the fifth person you passed by since leaving the house. These mundane and trivial facts are boring to your mind. If it were to spend too much time on these facts, you wouldn’t be able to concentrate on the more important things in your life. In fact, this selectivity in memory function is, like the quest towards efficiency, a survival trait. This time, however, this inborn survival trait can be trained to become an advantage in the modern world.

Although you may not remember the “small stuff,” you will most likely remember what you did on your birthdays, what the best Christmas present you ever got was, or who your very first best friend or lover was. You will also probably remember the details of particularly good Bart Simpson or Seinfeld shows, especially the really wacky and funny ones. Whenever your mind finds something interesting, it will strive to remember it. Your mind will find something interesting if it is funny, if it is life-threatening, if it evokes an emotional response from you, or if it is puzzling or strange. The original reason why your brain was designed to remember these types of things was probably to maximize your chances of survival in the jungle. Anything that is puzzling can be a potential aid, or a hazard. A person of the opposite sex is a potential mate for reproductive purposes. Remembering the events that led to a near-death incident would contribute to prevention of this kind of event in the future. If our ancestors forgot all these things, their chances of surviving or reproducing would be severely limited, and humans might not have lived till today - and invented schools, textbooks, classroom participation, and the final exam. So, in a nutshell, if you want to remember special concepts, make sure that you rework the terminology to make up strange, nonsensical, unusual, and interesting images, such as a “plastic-mother.” You should add action and sound and colour and basically put as much energy into the image as you can. Let your imagination run wild. Nothing is too weird. Remember, the only thing that counts is whether or not you can remember the material on the exam. If you have to think of really outrageous images, then do so. Nobody else is going to know anyway, except yourself.

Random Access - The Peg System

Independence from sequence

Let’s take another example. This time, I’ll use some material from John Naisbitt and Patricia Aburdene’s excellent book entitled Megatrends 2000. John and Patricia talk about the various patterns of change in the world today. They list ten of these “megatrends,” and they are:

The Booming Global Economy of the 1990’s.
A Renaissance in the Arts.
The Emergence of Free-Market Socialism.
Global Lifestyles and Cultural Nationalism.
The Privatization of the Welfare State.
The Rise of the Pacific Rim.
The Decade of Women in Leadership.
The Age of Biology.
The Religious Revival of the New Millennium.
The Triumph of the Individual.

If we had to memorize this for an exam, we should look at the key concepts in the selection. Here is the exert again, this time with keywords emphasized:

The Booming Global Economy of the 1990’s.
A Renaissance in the Arts.
The Emergence of Free-Market Socialism.
Global Lifestyles and Cultural Nationalism.
The Privatization of the Welfare State.
The Rise of the Pacific Rim.
The Decade of Women in Leadership.
The Age of Biology.
The Religious Revival of the New Millennium.
The Triumph of the Individual.

Let’s create some powerful images with the keywords:

Booming Global Economy - Earth (global) exploding in space(booming)
Renaissance - the Mona Lisa (Renaissance art)
Free-Market Socialism - flea-market (free-market) and soda (socialism)
Global Lifestyles - Glow-In-The-Dark (global) all-bran (“Life” brand)
Cultural Nationalism - Gnat (nationalism) Cult (cultural)
Privatization / Welfare State - A soldier (private) falls into a well (welfare)
Pacific Rim - Pacman (pacific)
Women in Leadership - Margaret Thatcher
Biology - a frog, or any other “lab animal”
New Millennium - HAL, from 2001: A Space Odyssey (millennium)
Individual - Indecent Video, a sex scene (individual)

Now, suppose we not only have to know each concept by itself, but also the number of the concept in the list of ten. This time, we will use what is known as the peg-system of memory, a generic term for this skill in memory systems. Leave the megatrends list for a moment and read the following descriptions:

A pencil is number one (it looks like the number one)
A tulip flower is number two (“tu” = two)
A tree-house is number three (“tree” = three)
A table is number four (four legs)
A hand is number five (five fingers)
A pair of dice is number six (six sides to each die)
A mirror is number seven (smashing it causes seven years’ bad luck)
A pair of skates is number eight (skating the figure eight in an ice-rink)
A cat is number nine (nine lives)
A telephone is number ten (ten digits)
Read the list over a few times, until you are sure you remember the item, and the number it is related to: One - pencil; two - tulip; three - tree-house; four - table; five - hand; six - dice; seven - mirror; eight - skates; nine - cat; ten - telephone.

Now that you have remembered the peg list, it’s time to attach information to each of the pegs (or slots for memory items):

A large balloon of the Earth (global) is spinning in space until a giant pencil (one) comes along and pierces the Earth, causing a massive explosion with a big Boom! (expansion) = Booming Global Economy (number one)

A giant tulip (two) grows out of Mona Lisa’s (renaissance) head, and she screams her head off = Renaissance in Art (number two)

Up in a tree is a tree-house (three) and in the tree-house is a flea-market (free-market). The people in the flea-market are being washed out of the tree-house by an enormous flood of soda (socialism) = Free-Market Socialism (number three)

A giant gnat (nationalism) stands high up in a table (four) at night and while glow-in-the-dark all-bran (global lifestyles) flakes fall from the ceiling, gives a speech to the cult (cultural) members sitting on the floor = Global Lifestyles & Cultural Nationalism (number four)

A soldier (privatization) is running in the battlefield when an enormous hand (five) shoots out from a well (welfare) in the ground, grabs him, and pulls him screaming and fighting back into the well = Privatization of the Welfare State (number five)

Now, finish the process by inventing images yourself with the remaining peg numbers and the rest of the megatrends list. Then, for practice, try to recall the entire megatrends list, and write down the concepts on paper in order. Then, write them down again in reverse order. Next, ask someone to test you. Tell them to say a number, while you tell them the concept that belongs to that number. Finally, change over, and tell them the number when they name the concept. You should be amazed at yourself. You probably got all of the concepts memorized for good now. If you didn’t do so well, perhaps some of the images were not as vivid as they should have been, or they did not work for you. Everyone’s mind works differently. What my brain finds interesting may not appeal to yours. If you wish, change the peg list, the megatrends images, or both. Do that now, until you can remember the list perfectly.

You now already know the basic mechanism for superior memory power. Just by applying what you have learned so far will boost your grade performance to new heights. These memory techniques will work with all subjects, but you may have to modify their usage with certain items such as mathematical equations, or scientific data. We will discuss these later, but for now, practice your new skills on other lists of items. Perhaps you want to remember the first ten technological inventions starting with the wheel, or ten famous people in history, or the top ten Fortune 500 companies. The possibilities are endless. You may want to test yourself again tomorrow, or the day after that. If you manage to recall all the items, that’s great. If not, then look at which items you recalled easiest, and which ones you couldn’t recall at all. Look at the memory images you used. Were they vivid enough? Did you make the scene funny, or ridiculous? Was there any action? Colour? Sound? Danger? With practice, you should be able to create better images, and soon you will be able to memorize almost anything, and have total recall.

When you have finished with your preliminary practice, your next task is to expand your peg list. Your present list of ten items is very limited. If you use it for different types of ten items, it should work fine as long as your images are not too similar to one another. However, if you need to memorize a list of items in a certain category and those items exceed the list, you will confuse yourself if you try to start again at number one (pencil) and re-use the list. You’ll be hard pressed to figure out if a certain item is number one, or eleven, or twenty-one. So you have to expand your peg system.

Try to create up to 20 pegs, then 30. After that, you may expand it up to even 100 items if you wish. Just be sure that each number has a peg item that has meaning attached to the number. For example, 52 could be a calendar, since there are 52 weeks in a year. Or it could be a deck of cards. The number 12 could be a clock, which has twelve numbers on its face. Be sure to use concepts that have meaning for you, because you will be the one using the peg list, and you will be the one attaching information onto it.

After a while you will start to realise that you are really using your brain with all these exercises. Using your memory in this way could sometimes cause mental fatigue, or a “headache.” This is normal. Your brain is an organ, and it too can get tired, but remember that just like other organs in your body, the more you use it, the healthier it becomes, and the better it can function. Keep training your brain, and eventually your memory skills will be almost automatic, and you will find that sometimes even without constructing memory-stories, you will be able to remember new information effectively.

When you feel ready to go on, let’s take a look at some examples of how these memory skills can be modified to be specifically applied to certain tasks.

Advanced Sequential Access - Putting Sonic Boom into Presentations

Preventing stage-fright in the boardroom

Suppose you had to memorize a speech, or a presentation. It doesn’t matter if you’re in the classroom, or the boardroom. Your success and your confidence in front of a group of people listening to you talking will depend entirely on your ability to recall the material you are presenting. This is where our cybernetic memory skills come into play.

Assume you had to give a presentation on the benefits of the new plasma rifle that your R&D department has managed to put together, and you want to put forward the proposal to manufacture this product and sell it to the public. Your basic argument is that plasma rifles are better than laser rifles. Since a presentation is not a direct reading out loud of an essay, you don’t have to memorize every word verbatim. So the first thing we do is to list out the key points we want to present:

plasma is an ionized gas - i.e., a gas with an electrical charge.
our plasma rifle fires a bolt of plasma at the enemy
laser attacks can be reflected by shiny armor.
laser rifles need to be constantly aimed at the enemy because the laser needs time to heat up the target area.
plasma rifles look cool on cyborgs.

Now, I’m sure you remember what “plasma” is, from the preceding section. Let’s use that image as a starter:

Imagine your plastic mother eating batteries and burping. Now, we need to remember the word “bolt” (fires a bolt at the enemy). Think of a thunderbolt, with a brilliant flash, and an explosion. Envision a thunderbolt slamming down from the heavens, exploding on your mother (sorry Mum!) and frying her hair. Now, see a knight in shining armour, riding on the thunderbolt. Hear the loud thunder. See the shiny suit of armour. Imagine how the shiny brass will make you squint your eyes because it’s so shiny. Now, while you’re squinting at the brass, suddenly an arrow flies towards you, shot by the knight, and stabs you in the eye! Ouch! The arrow represents aiming. Think of the pain, think of the horror! Now imagine you trying to pull the arrow out, and when you finally do (aren’t you glad this is just imagination?!) you realise that the “arrow” was really the minute hand of a gigantic clock! The clock represents time. Next, imagine you pushing the clock away because you’re so angry it stabbed you in the eye. Push the clock over a cliff, and watch it fall down, down, down into the depths. Imagine the clock screaming, cursing at you. Imagine it falling into the fiery heat of hell. Now imagine yourself sweating because of the heat. Picture yourself walking away from the edge of that cliff because it’s so hot. And finally, picture a million ice-cubes falling down on the sky and hitting your head. The ice-cubes represent “coolness.”

Ok, so that’s our memory story. It’s a sequential access memory aid because each image evokes the next one, and it is a continuous “mental movie.” Unlike the peg-system of memory, you cannot randomly pick a concept out. You must follow the entire sequence from beginning to end. And this is good. We need the sequential aspect, because we are memorizing a presentation, and presentations have a specific order from beginning to end.

Now, imagine yourself in the boardroom of the high-tech firm, CyberDyne Systems, Inc. Imagine yourself giving the presentation. What’s first? Think about your story. Oh yes, plasma. So you explain what plasma is: “Plasma, as you all may well know, is an ionized gas, or one that has an electrical charge. Our new plasma rifle uses that charged gas for defensive capabilities.” Then you remember the thunderbolt. So you tell them that the new plasma rifle shoots a bolt of plasma at the target. “Why is this better than laser technology,” someone asks you? You remember the shiny armour on the knight, and reply, “Oh, well, you see. Lasers can be reflected off shiny armor.” You go on and remember that the shiny light caused you to squint and you got an arrow in your eye, which turned out to be the minute hand of a clock. So you say to the crowd, “And not only that, but a laser beam has to be aimed at the target for a certain amount of time. A plasma bolt does not.” Then, you remember pushing the clock into the depths of hell and feel the heat rising up from the abyss, and say, “the reason for the aiming is that the laser needs time to heat up the target area.” Since you’re already on a roll, you start to improvise with the material you already have: “In contrast, the plasma bolt can be fired, and upon release from the rifle, the user is free to move about without having to continue aiming the weapon at the opponent.” Improvisation finished, you get back into the memory story, and remember that after pushing the clock down, you stepped away from the edge of the cliff because it was too hot, and suddenly ice-cubes rained fromthe sky: “And finally, the aesthetic value of our new product will appeal to cyborgs everywhere who want to look … well, cool with the new armament.” Applause and confetti. Take a bow. You’ve done a good job.

High-Resolution Graphical InterFACE - The Key to Personal Rapport

Remembering strangers and other weirdoes

One of the most important things a business-person must know how to do is remembering people’s names. In fact, this goes beyond business. A politician has to know the names of voters, and other important people. A teacher must know the names of certain students to give class participation marks, and to make the teaching environment more personal, more “user friendly.” But sometimes, it’s just too overwhelming a task. A cocktail reception, for example, probably consists of hundreds of people. How on earth is a person supposed to remember all of them?

The first key is to be selective. Are you sure you need to remember that person’s name? This goes for other information too. Unless you need to know it, spending time memorizing certain bits of information is a serious drain on your time and energy.

The second key is to utilize memory skills to assist you in this task. Here is the basic formula for remembering people’s names:

Pick out a specific reason why that person is important to you.
Find something unique about that person’s character.
Find something unique about that person’s physical appearance.
Make up a strange memory image with the person’s name.

Let’s take an example. Suppose you had to remember a fat, bald rocket scientist by the name of Jeffrey Wundershoes. I am actually cheating here, because immediately the name “Wundershoes” would evoke a strange mental image: A pair of magic shoes. You could imaging a pair of magical winged slippers, or diamond-studded loafers much like the pair Aladdin would wear while riding his magic carpet.

Next, we check out the person’s character background. He’s a rocket scientist. Picture a large rocket, with the NASA logo on the side, ready to take off. Now, think about the physical attributes of the person. He’s fat, and bald. Think of his head as the moon. It’s shiny, almost smooth. Imagine craters on his head. That’s a hilarious image in itself - my apologies to readers with receding hairlines.

OK, now, put all the images together. Imagine a large rocket, wearing magical shoes, smashing into the side of the moon. We forgot something. Why is this person important to us? If we can’t remember why he’s so important, we won’t understand why we had to know his name in the first place.

So we think about it, and realise that this person is, in fact, the father of our spouse. Wow. That makes for VIP status, does it not? So we imagine the rocket, with magical shoes, smashing against the side of the moon, and causing a massive explosion of rice everywhere. That’s right. Rice. It signifies a wedding. And that should remind us about family, about relatives. So we remember that this scientist (rocket) has the name Wundershoes (magical slippers), is bald (the moon) and is our relative (rice), in fact our father-in-law.

With other more common names, it gets a bit harder. The worst cases are names such as Smith or Jones. But we can tie those names to other things. For example, if we have a friend who wears black clothing all the time, or has black hair, and his name is Smith, then we could group those two ideas together to make “blacksmith.” Then we would use something related to what a blacksmith does, such as make horseshoes, or other iron objects. Tie those concepts together with the physical attributes, the personality traits, and the person’s importance to us, and we’ve got it made.

It is advantageous to write down a list of names for yourself, and create images with those names - images that make sense to you. Then, when the next cocktail party or social function rolls around, you will already have a prepared mental list of name-concepts that you can use immediately when you’re introduced to someone. A tip from me is to use first impressions. The very first things that strike you about a person are usually the key attributes that will remind you about he or she is.

Mental Fax Machines - Streamlining Your Studying

How to ace tomorrow’s essay-type exam

To conclude this chapter, I will present to you a tested-and-tried method of studying for exams with essay-type questions. I created this method for my own use, and now I share it with you. Be informed, however, that I assume you have had sufficient practice with the memory skills covered in this section to be competent enough to use them by yourself. If you have not been successful in the exercises we’ve been through, you must look at the way in which you have been constructing your mental images. Make sure they work. I don’t want you to have a false sense of security if you’re going to use this technology in a real exam. That said, I don’t want to discourage you either. The memory skills aren’t difficult. They just need some practicing, and time to get used to.

Here is the complete manner in which you memorize material from a textbook. Assume you had to memorize the following excerpt for a test tomorrow. Again, it is taken from Megatrends 2000:

When the great dystopian George Orwell wrote 1984, Stalin was still alive and Hitler had recently died. No wonder Orwell believed the dictator of the future would use technological advances to hold people in subjugation. This was also the premise of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Dictators do need to control information to maintain control, since knowledge is power.

But it did not work out the way Orwell and Huxley feared. Global television and video cassettes instead have curbed the power of dictators.

There are fewer dictators on the planet today because they can no longer control information; … The old men in China did decide to shoot down the student demonstrators in the full glare of television, but ten years earlier the students would never have reached Tiananmen Square in the first place. With individuals’ power extended by the computer, citizens can keep tabs on governments a lot more efficiently than governments can keep tabs on people.
Now, we must use a highlighter pen to focus on the key points. I know that there is a great controversy surrounding the use of highlighters, but like any other instrument, there is a way to use it and a way to abuse it. I’ll show you how to use it here.

Take the highlighter, and mark out the key points. Again, like we had to do for our presentation, the only things we need to know are the key points. We don’t have to memorize verbatim. Teachers give marks for points used in essay questions, not photographic memory ability.

Here is the exert again, with boldface where I would use my own highlighter:

When the great dystopian George Orwell wrote 1984, Stalin was still alive and Hitler had recently died. No wonder Orwell believed the dictator of the future would use technological advances to hold people in subjugation. This was also the premise of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Dictators do need to control information to maintain control, since knowledge is power.

But it did not work out the way Orwell and Huxley feared. Global television and video cassettes instead have curbed the power of dictators.

There are fewer dictators on the planet today because they can no longer control information; … The old men in China did decide to shoot down the student demonstrators in the full glare of television, but ten years earlier the students would never have reached Tiananmen Square in the first place. With individuals’ power extended by the computer, citizens can keep tabs on governments a lot more efficiently than governments can keep tabs on people.

Incidentally, the best highlighter that I have come across is the yellow one made by Major Accentâ„¢. I always keep several handy. I have found that its shade of yellow is just right. Other highlighters are either too bright, or too dull.

But again, this is my personal preference. If you like another shade of yellow, by all means use that highlighter, but the important thing to remember is to use the same type of highlighter for all your memory sessions. It appears to me that the brain gets trained to recognize certain text if it is lit up with the highlighter you normally use, and the brain tends to pick up that material easier the more it is trained to recognize text in that specific shade of colour. Notice also that I did not highlight complete sentences. It is my own theory that by highlighting only the important parts of a sentence, you force your mind to recognize the information on its own terms. You deprive it the luxury of treating the information as complete and done with, when framed inside a complete sentence. Sometimes, students find that they go on “autopilot,” without realising what they had been reading. By highlighting only fragments of a sentence, the mind is forced to actively reconstruct the meaning of the words, instead of simply “reciting” whatever the author wrote. In addition, the use of less highlighter ensure that you do not light up the page like a Christmas tree. Some textbooks look like they were painted with a highlighter, defeating the entire purpose of highlighting in the first place!

In any case, we have marked out the key concepts in the passage. Let’s look at the concepts themselves:

George Orwell was a dystopian who wrote 1984.
Stalin and Hitler were dictators.
Technological advances can hold people in subjugation.
Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.
Dictators need to control information.
Knowledge is power.
Global television and video cassettes curb power of dictators.
Dictators no longer control information.
Old men in China shot students in Tiananmen Square.
Computers help the public keep tabs on the government, not vice-versa.
By listing the concepts out, you are making notes. You are distilling the real information from the textbook. The next step is to memorize the information. We will use sequential accessing here because during the exam, we want to write down points which are congruent with one another, and follow the logical sequence of thought as was presented in the textbook.

The memory story might be as follows:

A talking pig (Orwell’s 1984) eats a disk (dystopian), munching loudly. Bits of plastic fall from its mouth. The disk is stained (Stalin) with paint in the shape of a Nazi sign (Hitler). The disk explodes and out comes a submarine (subjugation). Huckleberry Finn (Huxley) is riding on top of the submarine and carrying the world on his shoulders (Brave New World). A VCR remote control (information control) flies down from the sky and attacks the submarine, shooting infrared beams at it. Suddenly, thousands of volumes of encyclopaedias fall from the sky (knowledge) and fall into the water around the submarine. You plug a television (global television) into one of the volumes of encyclopaedia (power) and turn it on. There is an action movie playing (video cassette) on the television. It shows a man smashing his car against the side of the curb (curb power of dictators). An old Chinese man is almost run over by the car (old men in China) . The old man raises his gun and tries to shoot the driver (students shot). Suddenly, a whole legion of tin men or tin soldiers (Tiananmen Square) rush around the corner of a building. They are running by and drinking soda pop (tabs) at the same time. As they come closer, you see that their heads are large computer screens (computers) with the words “Miami Vice” (not vice-versa) on them.

What a really weird story! But if it wasn’t weird, you probably wouldn’t remember it. If you feel you’re ready, answer this question which might probably be on the exam:

Question 1: Discuss issues relevant to the ways technology can determine the distribution of power in society. Be sure to give examples to support your arguments.

Would you have panicked at the sight of this question, if you didn’t prepare for it? I sure would have! But now that you are armed with the memory story, you can breeze through it. A sample answer might be as follows:

George Orwell, the dystopian, wrote the book 1984 which discussed how technology could influence the control of power in a society. He was influenced mainly by dictators such as Stalin and Hitler. His primary argument was that technological inventions could hold people in subjugation. A similar author is Aldous Huxley who wrote Brave New World. Since knowledge is power, dictators want to control information. However, in modern times, inventions such as the television and the video cassette curb the power of these dictators and they can no longer control the information. An example of this would be Tiananmen Square, in which the Chinese government gave orders to have student demonstrators shot. However, the whole world could see what they had done. Another example would be the invention of the computer. It is another device which helps the people keep tabs on the government, and not vice-versa.

What do you think you would have gotten for this answer? Surely an A+!!! Can you appreciate the power you now have in your hands? Use it well. You have successfully gained the critical tactical advantage of cybernetic technology, and are a fully-fledged cyborg! Congratulations!

In the next chapter, we will look at the fundamental ways in which you function. In other words, we’re going to install the latest version of …