Severed

On the occasion of my sixtieth birthday, my friend Lenny visited me from Toronto. He is seven years older than me, and he gave me some sound advice: respect the limitations of your body. Lenny said that he no longer climbs ladders, even though he is a yoga instructor and his balance is good--climbing ladders just seems like a risky thing for a sixtysomething to do. The advice came just after I had binge-watched the first season of "Westworld," a TV series about machines gaining human consciousness (something that I, like many cognitive neuroscience professors, have been teaching for over ten years). In the world of the show, the bodies of the robots, unlike your body and mine, are easily repaired. A vast robot-repair shop remanufactures and reattaches severed limbs, and efficiently closes gaping wounds. For the past few years, I've been on a kick that I call the "pre-mortem": thinking ahead to what could go wrong and putting systems in place to minimize the damage if they do go wrong. For instance, I got a landline, in case the cell networks go down in a natural disaster such as an earthquake. I've taken cell-phone photos of my passport and credit cards, in case they get lost. I taped an emergency-phone-number list to the inside of the kitchen cabinet that is nearest the phone, and I put a combination-lock box in the back of my house to hold a front-door key, in case I lock myself out. I must have struck a chord with this idea, because my TED talk about it went viral. My wife, Heather, and I have our bedroom upstairs, and there is only one way out in case of a fire--down the stairs and out the front door.