The No Shut Up Gun

Ever been in a business meeting with one guy who just loves the sound of his own voice? Every culture that has business meetings has at least one of this guy, and it gets on everybody's nerves. Most societies chalk it up as a social problem and leave it at that, but Japan thought differently, and came up with a technological solution. The device is a gun-like device that, when the trigger is pulled, reflects all speech back to the speaker after a very short delay. This effect is very jarring, and while it could be worked around if you REALLY want to talk, it's enough to convince the average Japanese person to shut up, at which point you can put the gun down and continue the meeting. So the next time Yoshi won't shut the hell up about his new condo for seven minutes straight, suddenly you can whip out the gun, reflect his yammering back at him, and continue the meeting, as it'll only take a few milliseconds for him to realize what a doofus he sounds like. The effect is apparent to anyone who's had to work with a PA system or a shoddy cell phone. Hearing your voice after a short delay makes your brain not entirely sure if you actually finished what you've said, so you start getting confused, and after a minute or two of mumbling, the average person just gives up on speech entirely. The effect can be completely countered by plugging your ears, or just pushing on through anyway, as your brain can learn to adapt. Of course, if the gun doesn't silence a chronically disruptive person, the average company will likely resort to more extreme measures, like making the disruptive person leave.

Bodyswaps

A common element in fiction is to have two characters exchange bodies. Guy A and Guy B swap, so now Guy A's body has Guy B's personality and mind, and Guy B's body has Guy A's personality and mind. How does this happen? It's hand waved away as inexplicable magic, usually, and the plot usually revolves around developing a greater respect for each other, with various comedic misunderstandings along the way, as no one seems to recognize the abrupt changes in behavior and knowledge, or any of the other clues that this has happened. Sometime before the end of the story, they get to swap back. The closest real life version of this is a brain transplant, or more pedantically, a body transplant. After millions of attempts, we finally succeeded with monkeys, transferring the brain of one monkey into another, and vice versa. This was significantly harder than it sounded, mostly due to the difficulties in reconnecting the nerves, and both monkeys were thereafter paralyzed below the neck for the rest of their lives due to the insufficient reconnection of nerves. But what if there was a cheap, reversible, reliable, consequence free means of completely seizing another person's body, which most realistically will be done by putting your brain in their skull and reconnecting every single nerve. (Again, way harder than it sounds. Especially because a living brain is about the consistency of a raw egg yolk, and every severed nerve is basically going to stay severed forever.) I'm imagining that this actually has commercial potential for a lot of people. A body builder and I go down to the transplant center, and we swap bodies. I am now a muscular 25 year old man, and he is now a 31 year old fat bespectacled nerdy man. We also have to register this for security and legal purposes, which I will get into later. Surprisingly, we can both get something out of this. My benefit is more obviously immediate. I'm no longer fat, I can run for miles at a time, I have huge muscles and the strength to lift small cars, or at least motorcycles. I can easily climb the stairs to the top of my workplace without breaking a sweat. However, on the downside, our bodybuilder has also heavily into steroids. This has taken a major toll on his body, and he can no longer work out, his favorite pastime, without breaking his arms. He also may have developed hormonal issues, which can lead to such strange issues and gynecomastia, in which he's developed a case of awkward, teen-esque breasts (likely misshapen) and will need to wear a bra. His body has bizarre pimples and random hair growth from a case of puberty that eternally mutates into a worse version. His genitals no longer function, much to the annoyance of him and anyone he's seeing romantically. Since I had neither the inclination to use steroids, nor the knowledge of where to find them, my body does not have these issues. For him, he regains the ability to work out, and while we should probably remain celibate for the duration lest we cause extremely awkward feelings with our respective loves, he can enjoy some alone time, if you know what I mean. I will also care similarly for his body, and while he'll lose muscle mass and probably gain weight, I won't do steroids, and his body will become more fit for exercise over time, and his hormonal issues will subside as his body, under my control, returns to equilibrium. Under my direction, his body will repair injured muscles as well. He will have significantly better gains when he regains it. With my body, he'll have to start over from scratch, exercise wise, but his exercise hobby will lead to him pushing it quite hard. I anticipate easily losing 10 to 20 pounds from his anaerobic exercise alone, and that's assuming that he doesn't also do cardio exercises such as bicycling, swimming, and other sports popular with weightlifters. We'll remain swapped for two weeks to a month. When we trade back, his body is weaker than before the swap, but still very muscular and strong, fully repaired, fed a balanced diet, and ready for some seriously awesome exercise. His hormonal issues are gone, which his girlfriend will surely appreciate. After just two weeks of exercise (which will be both fun and easy for him), he will be able to show off his body proudly, and people will be able to enjoy looking at it. For me, under his direction, my body has lost weight, and gained serious muscle mass. If he hasn't done steroids while using my body, then my body is now looking quite nice. If he has, then I can treat it the way I treated his body, and the issues will fade. I look quite nice, and my girlfriend will surely appreciate it. I imagine other people will also quite cheerfully swap bodies to handle mutual issues. A cancer patient who can't keep weight down can swap bodies with an obese gourmand. A person who loves a food they are allergic to swaps bodies with someone who has no allergies, but doesn't like that food. (or could live without it.) A person who's too ill to leave the house swaps bodies with a shut-in who didn't want to leave the house in the first place. All sorts of benefits could happen. However, on the security angle, this would have to be tightly controlled. Say I, in a fit of nefariousness, swap bodies with a hobo, and use the hobo's body to commit lots and lots of crime. After the end of my crime spree, I then swap back and leave the country. The police swiftly arrest the hobo, who was seen on camera robbing banks, breaking into houses and stealing from them, punching people that I didn't like, and other highly illegal things. If he's particularly illucid or incoherent, he'll find it quite impossible to defend himself, and spend years and years and years behind bars for my evil deeds. I meanwhile live off my ill gotten gains where they'll never find me. The only way I could be caught would be if there was a record of the body swaps, showing that I was the actual identity of the man on camera committing all that crime. They would also have to catch me before I left the jurisdiction in favor of one with no extradition treaty. There's also the issue of property. The hobo now looks like the man in my wallet, and unless my wallet is taken out of my pants and moved to the hobos at the time of the surgery, he could very easily take it and my credit cards to whatever store he felt like, and I'd have a real hard time arguing that it wasn't me. Of course, Neurology is currently way too primitive to pull this off yet, so this is all moot, at least within my lifetime. The possibilities are truly crazy.

Neurotransmitter Drugs

Caffeine is a commonly used substance in my workplace. It is a stimulant drug that works in humans by interfering with the neurotransmitter adenosine, as illustrated by The Oatmeal Plants that make caffeine do so to retaliate against the insects that eat them. The bugs get overstimulated and panic themselves to death. There are many other mechanisms that could be interfered with. For example, seratonin. Blocking seratonin would interfere with the pleasure of hobbies and activities, but also addiction. Under the influence of seratonin blocking drugs, a person would not be motivated to seek out their addictions. Maybe instead they'd have a nap. Four months later, the drugs are discontinued, and the patient is encouraged to take up a hobby, which is now fun. Other mechanisms could cure anxiety disorders, weight control issues, impulsivity, and a host of other quality-of-life problems.

Printing a brain

Printed organs offer a major step towards immortality. I could take one cell from each of my organs, and use it to grow a brand new spare. I would then be guaranteed a very long life indeed, because disease or damage could be repaired fairly quickly by swapping my organs. Arteriosclerosis? New heart, no problem. Lung virus? New lungs. Cirrhosis? New liver. There'd be no chance of rejection, because they're grown from my own cells, and the cost would rapidly reduce over time from an economy of scale. However, if I had a stroke, or brain damage due to concussion, or became demented, I couldn't exactly swap out my brain. Or could I?
While if my brain were directly swapped out entirely, I would definitely be a different person, suppose only a small amount were changed at any given time. Starting with the moment that my doctor suspects that I'm developing a brain condition, I have a small amount of my brain biopsied and replaced with a printed copy of that section. This is allowed to heal and integrate back into my brain. Then a section a few inches further is biopsied and replaced, and over the course of about five years or so, every single piece is replaced. During the healing time, the neurons reestablish their connections, so at no point do I lose psychological continuity. And when the replacing is done, I have the brain of a twenty year old. If this works, then printing will make everyone immortal eventually. Well, not totally immortal, as you could still die from injuries, or if you have a brain condition that kills you in less time than it takes to replace-and-heal. But unaging and generally free of disease.
Or would you slowly lose your memory and personality over the course of the replacement?

Fruitfly Network

An interesting way of solving a wireless network problem was found today in fruit fly brains, reports Discovery News.
See, bug brains and wireless networks have a common problem. "Who's the leader?" To an individual brain cell or network node, it doesn't matter if it's the leader or not, so long as it definitely knows who's in charge. The bug solution has been applied to networks, for a saving of cpu power dedicated to routing.
In bug brains, neurons first see if there are any leaders near them. If so, they decline to become a leader -- someone's beaten them to it, why bother? If they don't find a leader, then this section of brain is leaderless, and they announce to their immediate neighbors that they are the leader. This tends to organize the leadership cells evenly through the fly's brain in a very efficient pattern.
To do this for wireless network, you only need two dedicated signals. One for "Any leaders around here?" One for "Yes, I am the leader." When a node turns on, it sends the first signal. If it doesn't hear the second one, then it puts out the second signal and sets itself to leadership mode. This isn't terribly difficult to set up even in hardware alone, so routers can route more efficiently....for cheap.

Mindreading

Neurology has advanced to the point where an EEG can now be used to answer yes or no questions, reports Discovery news. And this could be used for good or evil.
For good, it can be used to communicate with vegetative people. If they have enough brainpower left to understand you, you can put them in an EEG and ask questions. They're not conscious enough to answer you, but their brain activates in particular patterns when imagining answering the question, which we can now read. And this proves that people who have been unconscious for years can still recover: their brain still works.
For evil, I imagine that this may be used for coercive interviewing. The evil spy, government, or whoever, crams you into an EEG and starts answering questions of you. And you don't really have to answer him with words, your own brain will give you away. (Unless, of course, you've decided to rehearse your lies ahead of time.)

More on Emulating the Brain

Timothy Blee has a lot more to say about Robin Hanson's thesis of simulated people. Namely, Mr. Blee asserts that it is not possible.
Brains work in a very different manner than silicon chips. Silicon chips have a central processor, that can store data on temporary storage, like RAM, or permanent storage like hard drives. It cycles very very quickly. I recently bought a 3.2 GhZ processor. It cycles 3.2 billion times per second.
Brains, however, are a massive network of neurons that signal each other They cycle slowly, only 30 times per second, and can connect to many other neurons at any given time, and are always reconfiguring each other.
Mr. Blee then points out that emulation works in computers works because we know how both the target and host computer operate, and by Dr. Turing's theorem can restructure the directives to match the host computer's operation. We at this point have only a fuzzy idea of how the bran works, and our theories on it are constantly being proven wrong.
I think that it's hypothetically possible to emulate the brain -- but it may require radically different hardware. A massive memristor mesh would be a closer approximation than the machine on your desk (or lap). The hardest part is that the brain literally rewires itself as you learn things, and so far no hardware we have ever built does that.
I thought of this because of Mr. Hanson's previous rants about emulated people, and thinking how an emulated version of me could be handy at work. While I'm stressing and frazzled, I could pass messages to him and he could help me. (Which would probably even be easy for him...the world would move quite slowly from his perspective.)

Brain Hacks

There is a birth defect that leads to people who have no sense of pain. They can handle hot frying pans without flinching. They can have their fingers viciously bit by animals without noticing. Awesome, right?
No, not awesome. The average life expectancy for these people is 17, because pain is actually a pretty good warning system against damage. People with the disorder have a nasty tendency to accidentally bite off their tongues, not notice that an object is too hot to touch until they have second (or worse, third) degree burns (and the first hint they get that it's too hot in the smell of burning flesh), and didn't learn lessons in childhood about dangerous things that get them killed, like that electrocuting yourself is a bad idea.
So when a woman recently lost her ability to feel fear to neurological disease, science was very interested. She is never afraid of anything. When she was taken hostage at gunpoint, she only became angry and upset and gave the gunman a thrashing. People who give her death threats are quite surprised when she responds with face-withering invective. And all this because something damaged her amygdala slightly.
If we reverse engineer what happened, it may come to pass in the future that we can turn off our own fear, something that militaries and police departments would surely pay huge amounts of money for. Same with the pain thing -- save bundles on anesthetic in any hospital. Just so long as you turn it back on again afterwards.

Bee-based Intelligence

I think we could all use a little more intelligence. Nootropics, drugs that improve a person's cognitive function, have been really trendy lately. And now, an all natural, easily harvested substance has been found that works excellently. Namely, bee venom. Wait, what?
Discovery News reports that a study held in Belgium and England reveals that a component of bee venom, Apamin, excites neurons, and injecting onesself with a large amount of this drastically improves neuron efficiency.
Bees probably developed this as a way of magnifying the pain of a sting, to tell the various pesky animals that strive to steal their honey that this is a bad idea for them, and they should persue a different source of food.
Of course, chemical sythesis will probably develop something more effective at this, and cheaper. Milking bee venom is a slow, expensive, and incredibly boring task, but a chemically synthesized version will be saleable by the ton.

Flying Brain Games

I hate flying. I have severe motion sickness unless I specifically take medications to counteract that. I hate the crowding, the security nonsense, and the sitting in a seat with nothing useful to do for hours and hours. In the past, I've slept (a side effect of the medicine), looked out the window, and read that stupid catalog and all the magazines I was able to bring aboard. Going anywhere in the country in a few hours is nice, and air travel is still the only way to go to the other side of the world in a mere 12 hours.
Well, the boredom problem may soon be going away, says Discovery news, because a Canadian company is making a sysem where you neurologically control a computer, which has a screen on the back of the seat in front of you. You could use it to help meditate. Or practice golfing. (The virtual golf performs best when the system reads brainwaves associated with successful real-world golfing.) Or...the possibilities are limitless, at least in theory.
Probably about as useful as issuing everyone on the plane a laptop for the duration of the flight.

Outside is good for you

When you were a small child, did your parents tell you to go play outside already? Or were you the type that preferred to go outside to play anyway? In either case, going outside is not only good for you, but can even make you smarter, more creative, and happier? Wait, what?
It seems that there's some kinds of bacteria in most soils that can float through the air, and improves your brain's function should you inhale them. You're most likely to encounter them while walking on grass or dirt, and least likely inside, when you breathe mostly filtered air and have little contact with the soil. Mice given an aerosol spray of these bacteria could run a maze in half the usual time, and showed less anxiety to boot.
I'm also jokingly thinking about what these means to Internet addicts, who are stereotyped as shut ins. Could this be one of the reasons why they are so grumpy?

Control it with your mind

I think the trend in communication is towards concealment of technology. Same abilities, less footprint. Electrical wires are hidden in my walls, powering my devices. Plumbing, also hidden in the walls, brings me water and takes it away again. And phones are a little box that lets me talk to people that are thousands of miles away.
Back in the day, I remember, phones were larger. The size of my head, practically. The trend has been for smaller and smaller phones. I currently have a mobile phone about the size of two of my phlanges, which is way smaller than was seen as even possible when I was born.
Discovery is reporting that phones and remote controls may soon be replaced with a small unobtrusive hat that you wear and impose your will on your living room by your thoughts. It's another EEG project.
Or possibly more in the future. We may have cybernetic implants that let us think our way through a phone call, so you can reach the office by closing your eyes and concentrating. No more speaking aloud, which used to be necessary but will now just make you look like a tool. And controlling the TV? It already knows what you want to see and has tuned itself to the right station.
Okay, maybe no implants. Drunk calling is trouble enough on cell-phones, I don't wanna wake up tomorrow to find that I called Amenijad on my brain-implant and insulted him for several hours and now have a phone bill that costs more than a house.
But the possibilities are endless and amazing.

OpenEEGs

EEG, or Electro-Encephelo-Graph, (literally: the reading of brains electrically) is a means of scanning the electrical activity in the brain, usually for medical purposes. Devices can do it, but as medical devices, they come at a premium. After all, you only get one brain, and it's not like you can go out and buy another if you fry it. So the device is built to very exacting specifications.
A group called Open EEG has an EEG hardware and software system for scanning your brain electricity that you can build yourself, or, alternatively, order from Bulgaria. The hardware connects your brain to your computer, and the software analyzes the output. Having this knowledge, most people are then able to control their brain output via a biofeedback process.
Hypothetically, one could go on to do Mindtyping, therapy, or something else, but that hasn't been written yet.

Magnet Morality Manipulation

Discovery reports that a neurologist can manipulate a person's feelings about morality, to a rough degree, by putting their head into a strong magnetic field. Within the field, people evaluating the morality in a story concentrated slightly more on bad outcomes, and outside the field, people concentrated more on the intentions of the characters.
This could lead to, at best, a cure for sociopathy, a personality trait that leads to the indifference to the rights of others. Socipathy may be experienced in as many of 5% of the population, and is a major factor in many crimes.
Or, at worst, the Orwellian implications are staggering. The evil conspiracy doesn't like the way you think, so it straps a magnetic helmet to you and suddenly it's actions don't seem bad to you anymore.
EDIT: I just noticed that this will be published on April first. IT IS NOT A JOKE.

Regrow Nerves

I find it shocking that after 500 years growth of the field of medicine, there is still no good way to repair nerve damage. One break of your spine and everything below the break is lost to you forever. Meanwhile, a (mad) researcher can do a freaking head transplant, which would be useful if it didn't render all monkeys involved quadriplegic.
Meanwhile, neurologists are experimenting with nerve grafts, there's a few attempts at pills, even computer chips. (what the hell?)
There is everything to gain by succeeding in this. People could transplant limbs to repair amputation, cure paralysis forever, or even transplant human heads. (We put your perfectly good head off the old diseased body and onto a body whose owner smashed his skull. Everybody wins except him, but he smashed his head. There's not much we can do to fix that.)
And then there's Dr. Sakiyama-Elbert's nerve gel that can be squirted around nerve injuries. The nerves them repair around the gel, reconnecting and restoring the use of what was previously numb and paralyzed. Just a few more years testing to see if it really works. Sweet.

My Craziest Desire

The strangest thing I've ever wanted for myself is a head computer. A cyberbrain, if you will. It's technically possible, I believe Dr. Kevin Warwick will have one for sale within the next ten years. It's too early to be sure of the details yet, but let me talk about what I assume the advantages and disadvantages would be.
On the plus side, I should be at least able to offload all mathematical operations onto it. Let's say I'm shopping at the supermarket, and I want to know which can of corn is a better deal. One can is $0.90 for 8 oz, one is $2.50 for 30 oz. When this has actually happened, I am lost in thoughts for minutes as I attempt to make the necessary divisions. But using a computer (and my fingers), I can have an answer in 30 seconds, using a calculator program, "bc":

~ $ bc
bc 1.06.95
Copyright 1991-1994, 1997, 1998, 2000, 2004, 2006 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
This is free software with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY.
For details type `warranty'.
scale=2
.9 / 8
.11
2.5/30
.08

The second option is the better deal, at 8 cents per ounce. This would be even faster, since I wouldn't have to bother typing it, I would just think it and it would happen. I would also be able to write my blog from anywhere, and interface computers with no human interface devices. Don't need keyboards, mice, or monitors anymore.
In the event that brain-calculations and computer-calculations are compatible (which is dubious), I would gain a thousandfold increase in mental capability, sharpening my senses by significant amounts, and generally being a superhuman genius.
On the downside, this would involve the most invasive surgery possible. The device would need to be wired to my nerves, possibly even implanted in my brain through a large sawed hole in my skull. (Which I need like, well, to pardon the pun, a massive hole in my head.) Also, massive software security would be needed lest it be useful as a torture mechanism. It might be possible to control me through the device, or if not, drive me insane through incessant voices in my head. It may, depending on the construction, be possible to use the device to read my very thoughts. I don't give myself the pretension of thinking that anyone would give a crap about my personal thoughts, but if this becomes common, I can definitely imagine entities that salivate at the thought of being able to instantly read the mind of anyone they deem to be their nemesis.
Lastly, I don't know enough about medicine to know about how the immune system deals with foreign bodies. Would it grow scar tissue around the computer? (I don't want scar tissue in my brain!) Would the immune system attack the computer, ignore the computer, or attempt to cordon it off? Would an electrical malfunction in the computer result in me suffering an epileptic attack? (I don't have epilepsy now, but computers involve stronger currents than the brain usually has, and should they "leak...") If the computer's code should malfunction, could I be stuck with an annoying input that never goes away, or would I have some way to reset or turn off the computer?
Maybe this isn't worth it.

Neurological Legacy

We humans like to see ourselves as unique among the world. We are the only animals to invent things as distinct as opera and pneumatic hammers. We come up with things like candy, religion, and the Internet, and it makes us feel very special and different.
But if you ask a neurologist, you'll see leftovers from previous brain developments. We like to think of ourselves as a solidly different mind, but the civilized human is just the top layer. It's bolted onto a social-climbing, tribal, fang-baring, poop-flinging, chimp. And the chimp is bolted in turn on a territorial, furious, horny lizard. And the lower levels often show through routinely.
If you've ever shaken a fist in fury because someone cut you off in traffic, that's the lizard. It sees the space as yours and resents this other jackass's intrusion. It's wired to pick a fight with your competitor to force him or her to leave your space. The reasons vary by your gender (a female lizard wants a safe place to raise her eggs, a male lizard wants to show how well he can defend his mate's nest), but it will do little good in a car. After all, you're both in a big steel cage, moving at high speed. Attempting to fight will at best only injure yourself pointlessly. (That and both of you will have literally vacated the spot in 30 seconds if you just wait anyway.)
If you've ever had the urge to have a big party on Wednesday night despite having work on Thursday, you have the lizard to thank for that piece of impulsiveness too. Lizards don't really benefit from planning ahead, so they want to get all their impulses done NOW. And they aren't complex impulses. Stuff your face with food, find a mate and make some more lizards, and maybe modify your mind a bit with some fermented fruit, or that interesting cactus. That we humans have many more ways to modify our mind, usually to our detriment, doesn't help matters.
If you've ever wanted to throw up because you have to give a speech (be it for school, or a business presentation), hey, it's the lizard yet again. It's saying "Hey, don't do this status grab, fool, you might get killed." That the social consequences will be worse for not doing it doesn't occur to the lizard. After all, lizard social options are kind of limited. (Mostly to "bite that asswipe," "Ignore him," "Hey, check out my bod," and "mine, MINE MINE, back off or I'll kick your ass")
If you've ever blown your paycheck, it's the lizard yet again. Lizard doesn't grasp why you shouldn't just leap into the trough and eat until you can't move, or whatever it is that you want to do and it only kind of understands. The idea of "saving" doesn't really make sense to it. And "planning for the future?" Ridiculous, if you don't go get yourself a huge stash of bugs in your belly you clearly won't survive the inevitable famine. What do you mean food costs "money?" Clearly you should trade this "money" for more food, else what good is it, right human? What do you mean this "i-pod" thing cannot be eaten? If you can't eat it, why else would you want it so badly?
If you ever leered at a person until they got pissed off, ruining any chase you had with them, guess who's back? The lizard wants to make more lizards. Lots more lizards. Too much is not enough. This gives men the urge to check out the rack of every woman he can see, just to make sure if she'd make good kids with him. Women might be more discrete about this, but I've heard many a rant on a guy having a "spankable ass" and "awesome muscles." Somebody's leering.
If you've ever put off something until it was much too late and then had to stay up a week to do it, hello again! This doesn't feel good, why are we doing it again? See, to the lizard, everything that feels good directly influences their survival. Shoving everything edible into your face? Awesome, you survive the famine. Making more lizards? Awesome, once the eggs are laid they take care of themselves. Getting totally blitzed? Well, you didn't have anything to do until this evening anyway, and this will make the daily sunning much more fun. Consequences? Consequences are for mammals, who have to RAISE their offspring, whose veins will clog if they get too obese, and so on. And that term paper? Lizard cannot even grasp such a concept.
Now, these might sound like the lizard part is a bad thing that should be eliminated as soon as possible, but we didn't keep it for no reason. If you have a gibbering fear of death, that's the lizard. Being dead sucks, but if you weren't afraid of it, you'd step in front of a bus the moment things got hard because corpses have no problems. Same for the urge to reproduce. It's a lot harder for us humans, who don't just lay eggs and leave like they do. Without a little baby-craze, humans would be a rather uncommon and embattled species.
Now the monkey is a tad more complex. It understands the idea of having relationships with others of your own kind besides picking fights and mating. It grasps that cooperation is the best way to survive, so it encourages you to form a tribe. The tribe will help each other find food, develop a guard shift so that everyone can sleep but there is never a time when everyone is asleep, and smooth over some of the fighting. It gives you the more complicated emotions, like happiness, shame, and affection. So far, so good.
Unfortunately, the monkey often has strange ideas about the purity of the tribe. Any outsiders show up? Scream and hurl poop until they run away. In us humans, the poop-flining is now metaphorical, thankfully with invective and rude hand gestures. (Man, wouldn't it be horrifying if you angered somebody and their first response was to take off their pants and poop into their hands?) Anyone contradict you? Scream and hurl some more poop, that'll teach them. Someone too different from you? Kill, kill, before he affects the others! Rrarrrgh!
You see, the monkey started with the correct idea of mutual defense, but it's incredibly stupid and impulsive. In nature one must make snap decisions, but in any decent society, these decisions are the very avatar of wrong. Monkeys have no police, we do.
The monkey is also responsible for moronic dare taking. From an objective viewpoint, almost all peer pressure revolves around unbelievably stupid crap. If a complete stranger dared you to, let's say, cram a broken bottle containing a firework into your anus and then light it, you'd rightly tell him to go fuck off. But if your best friend dares you, hurrr, okay! This is because the monkey is all about status, and will do any moronic thing to keep it. Oh man, if I don't drive this car off a cliff into the jagged rocks below, my friends won't respect me anymore. I can't be a wuss in their eyes, I'll do it!
Now, all of this is not to condemn humankind to eternal stupidity. Since the lizard and the monkey are seperate, you can play them off each other for best results. If someone pulls a gun on you, the monkey will scream "fight! Fight!" whereas the lizard will tell you "run, moron!" Go with the lizard. If you have a term paper due next month, the lizard will be like "Meh, this isn't fun," but the monkey will insist "Do it, it's important!" Go with the monkey.