Question of the day: why did hedgehogs decide it was such an evolutionarily brilliant idea to migrate underground in the first place? Didn't they like sunshine?
Thought of the day: if ideas are really specific firings of neurons in the brain, it should be possible to create a device that reads the firing patterns from one person's brain (say a teacher) and then activates the corresponding neuron's in another person's brain (say a student or a whole class). If this can be done, essentially a class will be able to read the teacher's mind and learn effortlessly since nothing will be lost in the explanation of the concept. Of course teachers would have to be very careful with what they think about. For instance it would be pretty bad for a professor to be lecturing mentally on philosophy of language and then lapse into a thought about the disgusting mole on the forehead of a student sitting in the front row. It would be interesting to see what would happen if the mind-reader worked in two directions as well. If teachers could read their students' thoughts, I imagine their pupils would swiftly learn to focus their minds much more on the topic at hand.
Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately), the only way I can think of to make this technology an actuality would involve removing large sections of people's skulls and inserting hundreds of millions of permanent electrodes into their brains. This is not only technically challenging as an operation, but it would also make after school football rather difficult. I don't think I'd like to wear a helmet and hit people with my head when my brain is exposed and has millions of needles in it. That's just asking for trouble.
