Author: Michael Chorost
Publisher: Free Press
Publication Date: February 15, 2011
ISBN 10: 1439119147
ISBN 13: 978-1439119143
Pages: 256
Price: $14.84
World Wide Mind: The Coming Integration of Humanity, Machines, and the Internet presents, in more or less layman’s terms, a roadmap to building technology capable of reading and stimulating neural activity in the brain related to memory, with the ultimate goal of sharing that information via the Internet with other people connected to this World Wide Mind. As the recipient of cochlear implants himself and through a profoundly personal story of his own search for personal connectedness, Chorost is in a unique position to consider the impacts of melding the human body with technology and enabling the sharing of a deeper level of human consciousness.
At its heart, World Wide Mind is the ultimate love story. Chorost is on a journey towards self enlightenment, learning to overcome his own self image of being “short and deaf,” which prevented him from being fully open to experience true personal intimacy—not physical, but the emotional and conscious sharing of another persons’s innermost being. Unfortunately for some readers, Chorost’s path to discovery led right through a clothing-optional intimacy workshop, which may fall squarely outside the comfort zone of more inhibited individuals. This journey, however, is interleaved with fascinating medical and biological research into the inner workings of the brain and ways to monitor that activity, tied neatly to the learning and growth Chorost does through his workshop experience.
Scientific advances in neurobiology and a field Chorost introduces called “optogenetics” (the genetic modification of neurons to display and respond to certain wavelengths of light) are built in concert with the author’s journey towards deeper interpersonal connections. Rather than being simply another technological means of communication, Chorost posits that the World Wide Mind could allow for an entirely new form of telempathetic sharing. For more prudish readers, fear not: a telempathetic connection as described in the book can be achieved while fully clothed.
Conventional wisdom holds that technology tends to be colder, more impersonal, and ultimately isolating (just think of how many times you have seen several people at a table each reading their own facebook/twitter/whatever feed on a smartphone rather than communicating with the people with whom they are sharing a meal)! The impersonal media of the telephone and telegraph were decried as ruinous to civilization itself, because they would lead to the downfall of face to face communication. By enabling people to share not just a tweet about their dog’s latest antics, but to share instead a visual memory of the event and the feeling of joy associated with the event, this connection could bring people closer together.
Chorost’s contribution is not so much a specific technological path—indeed, the theoretical trappings of the World Wide Mind, including genetic modification of the brain and implantation of LED lights with fiber optic cabling in the skull, make the entire notion highly undesirable (imagine standing in line for the latest iPhone, only you need anesthesia, retroviruses, and that awful hospital gown while recuperating). Unlike science fiction such as Star Trek, where the writers are both unconcerned with and unconstrained by reality, Chorost lays out a vision of human-machine integration that is at least technically feasible, if not very pleasant. World Wide Mind pulls from advanced research in neuroscience, biology, traumatic brain injury treatment, and social sciences to build a conceptually feasible view of this World Wide Mind, and its potential impacts on humanity’s ability to share experiences.
The ability to plug your mind into the Internet may invoke visions (for the Trekkies out there) of the Borg Collective or Vulcan mind melds. But the technology and the ways of sharing mind-to-mind that Chorost describes are more closely related to ancient oral traditions carried by bards and other storytellers. The World Wide Mind provides a connection and platform on which to share memories and emotions, much as a storyteller would evoke scenes of long-past heros or epic battles to a group. Group members visualize the scene in their own way, adding their experiences to the framework laid down by the storyteller.
In a way, the World Wide Mind is a step back from the explicit images we are accustomed to with movies and MMS, but maybe the point is to return the humanity of interpreting shared experiences with our own unique perspectives. As stated before, this book is a love story, one that is less about loving the latest gadget and more about finding the love for our fellow man. If you are willing to suspend disbelief, genetic modification of your brain’s neurons and a fancy LED rig in your head could be the key to doing that.
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