thebluespectre wrote:

Impossible today, of course, but would it be possible in-game to psychosurgically rewire a character's ego to remove neural damage? What if they were born with it? Say, what if a Jovian was born with Down's Syndrome, would mind hacking them allow them to function normally? What if they were smuggled out of the Republic and resleeved, would the new, healthy brain allow them to function? How does all this work? Lastly, tangent: Why does the Farcast blog keep calling autism a mental disorder when it is neural damage? It's isn't something that can be suppressed with pills, and it can't be caused by trauma alone. It's not a disease, it's just being a little different.

The questions you ask relate to the difference between the disease of the mind, and disease of the brain. And medical knowledge on which any given condition is has evolved considerably in the last few decades and is still evolving. Some conditions are clearly caused by defects in the brain, some acquired before or soon after birth, some by injury. But our ability to recognise a defect of the brain still has a long way to go. Consider if you will chronic depression, a condition that was until relatively recently considered to be purely mental, is now recognised as a hormonal imbalance to be treated with drugs but the hormonal imbalance could be caused purely (or primarily) by a as yet undetectable deficiency in the neurons responsible for regulating the activity of the hormone producing cells (making it neural damage). As to the effect of these things in game. Psychosurgery works exclusively on the ego, so it would not be able to correct neural damage but I would expect the level of understanding of the human brain and nanotech in EP would allow neural damage to be corrected. Probably best done in a healing vat but could be done with injected nanites. Probably best to do it on the morph without a resident ego. This wouldn’t correct all the problems of Down syndrome, which is a result of additional genetic material that has systemic consequences (I used to know what they got an extra copy of but I forget). It would be a good idea to clean this extra material and correct the other structural problems that resulted from it but fixing the brain would be a major improvement. As to the result of moving an ego from a brain with neural damage to one without that is a good question and I can only speculate as to the answer. It will depend a lot on the type of neural damage and what effect it had on the developing ego. For example if the motor cortex was prone to shorts resulting in shakiness (I don’t know if this happens) then the ego would be largely unaffected and a new body would solve their problems. Somebody born with an undeveloped language centre (suffered by some uplifts) would, after resleaving, be unable to communicate, they may or may not have difficulty learning to communicate depending on whether there ego contains the necessary structures to build upon. These anomaly’s of the ego resulting from developing in a morph with neural damage could possibly be corrected with psychosurgery. It would be an uncommon procedure, and each iteration more unique than even is normal for psychosurgery so it would be difficult. As an aside. I recall that a young brain is structurally wired to be better at learning new skills than an adult brain. I am seeing people (wealthy people) paying for a brand new young morph when going back to school or university to get the advantages of a young brain.