unforum

[C_Brennan]

[New Website Online] CNV Cognivia

[cassandra]

Wow. Wow. What a lot of information!

What I noticed first was:

[toongoon]

Not surprisingly a request for product information returns an autoresponse of:

[cassandra]

Fascinating. Amusingly enough, I'm currently taking what seems to be the Earth Ceretin prototype - Modafinil. (PS. doesn't the photo resemble sudafed tabs?)

[tanner]

the Fourth Cerebral Prostheses Conference.

WOW

[Zedix]

Don't forget the login page! http://www.cognivia.com/login/

Disabled, pfft!

[am520dj]

Been waiting for this to finally get online, probably now because of the cards being released...

Anyways, something was not quite right when i was going through the pages.. and then it hit me: REAL PICTURES! I think this is the first site with actually pictures and not drawings. I don't know if anyone mentionede this before by the e3 picture, but i'll just point it out now anyways.

[toongoon]

[toongoon]

From News

[Leeravitz]

Ah, so some indication that the black market problem may actually be of the company's own making?? That *is* weird...unless they're deliberately flooding the market for trial purposes...?!!

Hmmm. Never trust *anyone* whose site proclaims 'Better Living through Chemistry'.

[toongoon]

[Leeravitz]

Many of Cognivia's products are further developments of chemical usages known on earth. Halcyon is an advance on Prozac and related SSRI's, and Mneomysyne sounds to me like they finally got 'smart drinks' working!! There's also expedine, which is some kind of vicious Speed/Pro -plus beating combo

The two unusual products are Synergy and Cardinal, both of which will enhance brain creativity by inducing states that are, within our culture, effectively randomly distributed. Synesthesia will allow you to taste smells, hear colours and other such mysterious things, while inducing Asperger's seems a bit odd (there are a lot of socially dysfunctional aspects to having Apserger's Syndrome, which is why it's called 'High Level Autism' i.e. it's a form of Autism which does not prevent a person from living life in a way which is more outwardly 'normal' than that of a sufferer from chronic Autism), but I imagine that what is being generated here are not the unpleasant aspects of Aspberger's but the ability many sufferers from Autism have to be mathematical geniuses, architectural geniuses, lingusitic geniuses etc.

In truth, I find it a bit hard to visualise what your behaviour would actually be like if you were on these drugs - they may be socially sanctioned, but I suspect that a few deleterious effects are likely to accrue. Being on Expedin would almost certainly be like being on Speed (but even more so), and as for Cardinal, it sounds like the Cocaine of the Perplexian world to me. Take it, and you'll be able to succesfully calculate Pi to the Nth place, no doubt, but you may only become capable of doing this by shutting down other processes that would normally function in your brain.

[cassandra]

There's a plethora of articles out there on the "geek syndrome" (Asperger's) ever since someone correlated the increasing number of autistic/aspergers diagnoses in California children (particularly in Silicon Valley) with the aggregation of tech culture - I'll look for a link...

Anyway, I suspect (like Leeravitz) that Cardinal will induce a syndrome wherein social behaviors are temporarily retarded and processing mathematical/visual/structural capabilities are greatly enhanced - producing a temporary obsessive focused state.

[sledgecallier]

There was an interesting programme on (UK) Channel 5 TV last night about a savant called Daniel Tammet who had the ability to see complex numbers as shapes and landscapes. Tammet had recited Pi to something like 20,000 decimal places and had learnt conversational Icelandic in just a week. (I'm guessing that from the descriptions used Tammet has Asperger's as well as he seemed to be able normally in the outside world and yet displayed abilities usually associated to more autistic people, who are more generally likely to display symptoms of lacking advanced social and communications skills.)

[spugmeistress]

further to the comparing cognivia products to our drugs, at first i thought the synergy/creativity one was a bit wierd, but also immensely cool, could definitely do with it for my uni work sometimes :) but thinking about it, people do already reckon that stuff like smoking marijuana or taking other hallucinogenic type drugs makes you more creative. my art tutors have definitely recommended the odd spliff or two in the past :s so it seems all of them have some kind of 'our world' correlation, maybe we dont have a drug that gives you aspergers but we do have aspergers itself.

the other thing of note is the wide availability and limited availability on some of the drugs. ceretin seems pretty broad and harmless, like you would take aspirin or something, but the others that are limited, are they prescreption only or one of those ones that are kept behind the counter in pharmacies and the pharmacist makes you answer questions before you're allowed them? also interesting to note that you arent allowed to use them in test situations, these drugs arent mainstream/normal enough to stop them wanting fair play under competitive or assessable situations. makes me wonder how they can tell half the class havent taken ceretin before a maths gcse though...

rach =)