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It could be that the brain makes everything up. Within minutes of being separated from a larger mass, neurons start sending out tentacles in the lab dish. Implanted chips rather than rubbing away our insulating skin with a metal rasp to get a decent EEG signals.

I’m at the NESTA hot topics debate – Mind over Matter: will computers enhance or limit our brains in the 21st Century. It’s funny- it seems all to be about the brains and the body is having a hard time. It gets ruptured, probed, explored, augmented. The perception from Professor Kevin Warwick is that the body is redundant and wasting time in the gym is pointless. I am uncomfortable with this view, as it suggests a forward global trend towards more cities, unlimited resources and a distance from physicality that hints at no way back.

However enthralling and compelling the visions of computer interfaces are, I am disturbed by the pooling of collective memory and processing power. The debate becomes very philosophical- where do we stop. The urge to move beyond communication into cyborg territory makes it a risky time for the biological brain.

Dr Anders Sandberg reminds us that we’ve always struggled to define the ‘self’. There is a kind of continuity between our life events but it’s difficult to say, this is the self. We are putting our thoughts into the world, the brain, databases (including notebooks) and then there is collective intelligence which is maturely symbolised by the Internet.

Emlyn Clay reminds us that our brain has special qualities in not being able to switch things on and off in a computational sense in the brain. For instance, our senses. The debate ranges over whether children have greater plasticity than adults, and that this gets less and less. The amazing recoveries made by stroke patients. The brain is very mercenary and has to be forced to do some things. It can also get very excited about things. Warwick believes there is evidence of a brain within a brain, something which tells the brain what to do. Sandberg reminds us that Parkinson’s Disease and the parts of the brain controlling motivation are closely linked. Plasticity can work both ways, you can unlearn and forget as easily as learn and remember. Everything you do for stimulation is a form of compromise.

At PICNIC 2011 today I’m listening to Dr Beth Coleman from MIT talk about ambient co-presence, and how our activity is a kind of modern media portrait. How are we manifesting co-presence- it’s the trail we leave when we check in with locations using social media as well as traditional forms of digital co-presence: skype, for instance. She is talking about visualised forms of our portrait, photo realistic avatars through to much more basic representations. She is talking about chatbots- because AI was too poor and the expectation is high- real time feedback even from an avatar dog. We need to think about gesture and interface not just photo realism. Real time is for people not for computers, and mediation using avatars is about mediation between people not people to computers.

Coleman sees this as shifting values, and a users ‘now’ is happening in various places and various times. She is talking about the phenomena of missed calls being used as both the carrier and channel of communication as well as signifier of something if you know the context.

In Coleman’s view we have arrived in a virtual world not from separated approaches of Second Life, but because we now have ‘ex realities’ when the ‘now’ can happen at any time. So we need designers and practices of engagement when the apparatus for projection and display are all around us.