Magic system thoughts?

Normally, it's impossible to overuse your brain to the point that you damage it. However, you can lose touch with reality by focusing on the wrong things. What if as your mentalists delve deeper into their mental worlds, they get further from reality? So instead of breaking their brain, they become more prone to delusion and schizophrenia and other breaks from reality.

Another alternative is that the brain does suffer damage, but from overheating, like a CPU in a computer.

Your specialism example of reading thoughts would be an extension of telepathy. Going with that, specialists in heightening senses would gain limited precognition, like the spidey sense from Spiderman. Improved memory becomes eidetic memory (I've read that a perfect eidetic memory is able to see a picture where half the pixels at random are missing, then weeks later be shown the other half, and be able to reconstruct the whole picture in their mind by overlapping the two). With the data processing, you could further specialize in different kinds of data, just so they don't become gods who can understand and predict everything. Maybe a language specialist could even communicate with animals, for example.

 

Depends on what you do with it. It'd be interesting to see as a replacement for traditional magic in a fantasy setting.

 

I'm going to disagree with everyone else here. The neat thing about the brain is that it is so complex: it is incredibly difficult to know what things are not "perceivable" by our sensing organs and what is not "processable" by our brain. Our brains cannot handle all the raw input coming in at once, so it auto-fills in areas and skips over stuff it expects to be there: that's why "blind spots" can be "mental" instead of physical and why optical illusions work. Our brains are doing both voluntary and involuntary stuff all the time, just as we have our muscles doing voluntary and involuntary stuff (you don't tell your heart or digestive system to do things, but you move your arms and legs because you tell them to. But a lot of that is on "autopilot" once you learn how to do something).

So now the question is...what is the brain? Scientifically we know what it is, the kinds of chemicals involved, but because the number of things involved are on the scale of billions and trillions, we cannot reproduce things ourselves. We cannot take a part of the brain and rewrite it to make a new memory or give someone the ability to do kung fu, but we can specifically excise and replace a part of DNA to put in code to cure a genetic condition. So if you want to get magical/metaphyiscal with how the brain works (especially since your magic system is based around the brain) you can run with that.

In the Zero Escape games, they talk about several metaphysical concepts, including morphogenetic fields. The question it posits is: What if "you" do not actually reside in that grey matter between your ears? What if human consciousness resides in some central location and it is simply sending information to your body? The metaphor they used was ye olde computers, where at your desk was a "terminal" with a monitor and a keyboard, but the actual "thinking"/computering was done at the huge computer somewhere else. But if you opened up the terminal and started cutting wires, the "computer" would stop "working," so you would think that the whole computer was your terminal, when that isn't the case. The terminal could only do a limited number of things because of the limits of its hardware, but it could do a lot more if given the right stuff. For a more modern example, think of your Chromecast plugged into your TV, vs a PS5 pugged into your TV, vs whatever giant computer(s) that run the internet being plugged into your TV.

So back to your story. What, exactly, is the brain? What is the individual? Does the individual's consciousness actually exist within the brain? When people do magic to make their brain more good, what is happening? Are they "overclocking" it and making electrical signals go faster? Are they juicing themselves up with a big influx of glucose? Are they accessing the akashic records? Are they astral projecting a little outside of their body so they're less limited by their meat suit? Are they tapping into the consciousness that all of their species share? You don't need to have the answer for it 100%, and you don't have to totally science it out. In Dune they have something similar but with a "sci fi" explanation, but let's be honest, it's magic. It's think really good to a magical level, but since there's space ships people say it's sci fi. Even if the backend of your magic system doesn't make real life sense (what is it about worm jenk makes you able to see into the future a little bit???? or makes your eyes blue? Or live a long time? or turn into a weird fish creature???) but as long as its internally consistent, it'll work out. Anyways, magic is just a tool for storytelling. It's how people use it to solve (or make!) problems that matter. How exactly spice works isn't really explained, and it doesn't matter. We just need to know that spice is VERY valuable and critical in so many ways for modern society to work (just like oil!) and it comes from the worms, so we can't kill them off. But because it's so valuable, whoever controls Arrakis controls the universe, pretty much. That's why the Atreides and the Harkonnen fight, that's why everything revolves around Arrakis.