Chapter 124: Amortentia Work Injury

Besides the headache, in the next few days, Murphy also experienced symptoms like lethargy, slower reaction speed, and a craving for sweets.

He felt that The Lion King was playing in his brain every day. Now it wasn't just the lines; he felt that if he gave himself a pen, he could draw The Lion King from beginning to end.

"In short, these are the consequences of increased neural connections." Omid Abbott explained.

"I just recalled a movie I watched in the past in my mind, and it will increase so many neural connections?" Murphy was a bit skeptical. "Then you read papers every day, wouldn't your brains have been blown up long ago?"

Murphy didn't mention The Lion King, just roughly explained the phenomenon he encountered.

Omid thought for a while and said: "I can explain this from two aspects."

"On one hand, the amount of information obtained by your Holographic Recall might be much larger than a few papers."

"How so?"

"Our brains are very smart. The amount of information we come into contact with every day is unimaginable. For example, visual information, our eyes have extremely high resolution. Converted into pixels, it has hundreds of millions of pixels, and our ability to recognize dynamic vision is close to thirty frames per second. Converted into bytes, just visual information has an information volume of more than 15 gigabytes per second."

"One day is more than 600 petabytes of data."

"With such a large amount of information, our brain actually doesn't process it all, but according to its attention mechanism, only selects some parts that need special attention to calculate. The vast majority of information is not processed. And by associating some useful information with known information, we form memories. The part of information that is finally remembered is much less."

"Due to this memory method, most of it is indexing and association of past memories. Even some images and scenes will be simplified into some elements and features, so converted into text, it actually doesn't have much, not even as much as a paper of tens of thousands of words."

"But according to what you said, Holographic Recall can allow you to clearly remember almost all the details in that scene, so its information volume is probably quite large."

"On the other hand, you might have some misunderstandings about how the brain works."

"In fact, the human brain is working all the time. In the 'game' time in the cognition of ordinary people, it is still a continuous learning and training process for the brain. This kind of learning and training is essentially no different from learning a paper for the brain."

"The brain is learning all the time, but the reason our heads don't get bigger day by day is that while we are learning, we are also forgetting. A large number of neural synapses are established every moment, and are decaying every moment."

"This is the way our brain keeps updating at all times, focusing its energy on the problems we are facing now."

"Our understanding is that in the process of you using Legilimency on yourself, a large number of 'sleeping synapses' were awakened, and a large number of new neural connections were formed. Its overall information volume might be equivalent to the information volume that the brain of an ordinary person should increase in four or five days or even one or two weeks."

"In such a short process, bearing such a large information burden, yet without a forgetting mechanism to reduce the burden, your brain naturally has to spend some time to adapt."

Murphy understood, but still asked: "Are there any ideas for improvement? I mean, without the kind that requires hanging a Pensieve outside."

To be honest, that feeling of having a clear view of his own memory was quite good. As if as long as he wanted, he could replay every second of his life from childhood to adulthood.

Not to mention how many treasures he could dig out from it, just the significance of further mastering his own body and thoughts made him not want to give up this spell.

"Perhaps enhancing the brain's ability would help improve these symptoms," Omid said. "But our brain is already the most efficient and powerful computing tool in nature. It's hard for me to imagine how else to enhance it."

Murphy thought for a while, and suddenly clapped his hands. "You don't say, the wizarding world really has a way to enhance intelligence."

He took Omid to the Potion Laboratory located on the eighth floor.

Compared to the Spell Research Room and the Magical Creature Laboratory occupied by various magical creatures and the Transfiguration Research Group, it was much quieter here.

Currently, there are only three research groups, with a total of more than twenty people working here.

And their main task is to analyze Beautification Potion and Amortentia, to find a way to replace the wizard's production of these two potions with Muggle methods—at least replace some of the steps.

Relatively speaking, the analysis work of Beautification Potion is progressing faster. For example, they have already made intermediate potions that do not contain fairy wings and unicorn hair, reducing the steps of wizard production of Beautification Potion from seven steps to three steps.

And the analysis work of Amortentia is progressing relatively slowly.

On one hand, the production process of Amortentia itself is indeed much more complex than Beautification Potion.

On the other hand... Murphy has heard many reports of chaotic relationships between men and women in this group...

It is said that the Amortentia research group, with a total of nine people, five men and four women, actually developed more than a dozen couples, including various explosive three-view permutations and combinations such as male-male, female-female, male-male-female, female-male-female, male-male-female-female, etc.

Laura reported that this chaotic relationship between men and women delayed the research progress of Amortentia and suggested regular rotation of members of the research group, but was rejected by Murphy.

Good guy, rotation, wouldn't that turn the entire research institute into a love testing ground?

I let you come here to do research, not to let you do "the most powerful and ancient magic."

Moreover, Murphy felt that this matter couldn't blame those researchers.

This might even count as a work injury.

Working in an environment filled with Amortentia all day long, they didn't hold parties together all day, and still had the heart to conduct research, which already showed professional ethics.

Besides Beautification Potion and Amortentia, other potion research was basically the personal interest of researchers. Some studied Skele-Gro, some studied Pepperup Potion, and some studied some magical materials such as Moon-Obsessed Beast excrement, Motra Rat juice, dragon blood, etc.

This kind of research was relatively offbeat and far from Murphy's overall goal of "enhancing wizard ability," so it was not valued by everyone. Therefore, usually, each kind of research only had one researcher doing it alone.

Compared to the members of the large research groups who huddled together, they appeared relatively lonely, so they self-deprecatingly called themselves "lone wolf researchers."

The one Murphy was looking for today was a lone wolf researcher.

"Pex Moore," Murphy found the tall Slavic male wearing gold-rimmed glasses. "His research topic is..."

"Wit-Sharpening Potion." Pex said proactively. "I think it can make a person's mind more flexible."

(End of chapter) ===== CHAPTER 125 =====