World Wide Mind: The Coming Integration of Humanity, Machines, and the Internet - Hardcover

Chorost, Michael

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1439119147 ISBN 13: 9781439119143

Publisher: Free Press, 2011

Synopsis

This is the first book that explains exactly how the brain reacts to the technology we use every day to communicate. Specifically, Michael Chorost details what processes/chemicals in the brain are stimulated when you touch your iPhone, and what chemical addictions compel you to check your e-mail. Going further, he explains the groundbreaking technologies that are being developed now to improve the way we communicate.

Chorost posits that the way our brains will eventually connect is in a space called the World Wide Mind, a space similar to the Internet.

In the process of explaining these ideas, he teaches us a lot about why we're addicted to our iPhones and e-mail, how to break away from those addictions, how we humans are meant to connect with each other and what diseases, such as Parkinson's, can be cured with the brain research that is making the World Wide Mind possible.

About this title

About the Author

Dr. Michael Chorost was born with a severe hearing loss due to an epidemic of rubella. He didn’t learn to talk until he got hearing aids at age 3½. Those enabled him to grow up speaking English more or less normally, allowing him to pursue a B.A. in English from Brown and a Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin.  On July 7, 2001, he lost the remaining hearing in his one usable ear and got a cochlear implant shortly afterward. This experience was chronicled in his book, Rebuilt: How Becoming Part Computer Made Me More Human (Houghton Mifflin, 2005), which won the PEN/USA Book Award for Creative Nonfiction in 2006, and has been optioned for the screen.  He lives in Washington, D.C.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Prologue

A Dead BlackBerry

[H]uman nature was originally one and we were a whole, and the desire and pursuit of the whole is called love.

—Plato, The Symposium

When my BlackBerry died I took it to a cell phone store in San Francisco’s Mission district. I handed it over to the clerk the way I would give my cat Elvis to the vet. “JVM 523,” I said mournfully. When I’d woken up the screen was blank but for that cryptic error message.

The clerk called tech support while I wandered around the store, peering at cell phone covers and batteries. He beckoned me over ten minutes later.

“It’s dead,” he said.

“You can’t just reload the operating system?”

“They say not.”

“How can a software bug kill a BlackBerry?” I said. “It’s just code.”

He shrugged. He hadn’t been hired for his ability to answer philosophical questions. But, he told me, for fifty bucks they could send me a new one overnight.

“All right,” I said, and walked out, minus BlackBerry.

The stores were full of avocados and plantains, $15 knapsacks hanging from awnings, and rows of watches in grimy windows. Crinkly-faced women pushed kids in strollers and grabbed their hands to keep them from pulling no-brand socks out of cardboard boxes. The world, whole and complete.

Except for my email, and the Internet. Just me and my lone self-contained body. I missed my BlackBerry’s email, of course, but what I missed just as much was having the planet’s information trove at my fingertips. I couldn’t summon Google on the street and ask it questions. How high is this hill I’m climbing? What do the critics say about this movie? Where can I find camping equipment on Market Street? When is the next bus coming?

Most of all, I couldn’t ask it, “Who is this person?”

I had asked it that question a few months earlier while visiting Gallaudet University, a school for the deaf in Washington, D.C. I wanted to see how American Sign Language dealt with fractions and cosines. So I was taken to visit a math class.

The professor was blond and flamingo-slender, with a snub nose. She spoke with the distinctive lisp of a high-frequency hearing loss. It was a warm spring day, with breezes tumbling in through an open window. I soon saw how fractions were done. She signed the numerator using a one-handed code for the numbers 1 through 9, dropped her hand an inch, then signed the denominator. As she discussed slopes, she gestured them in midair in a lovely hand jive of math and motion.

The class handout gave me her name: Regina Nuzzo. I unholstered my BlackBerry, held it under the desk at an angle, called up Google, and stealthily typed her name into it. I scrolled down the results with the thumbwheel. Ph.D. in statistics from Stanford. Postdoc at McGill, on analyzing fMRI data. Progressive hearing loss. And she was a science writer, too. She had just done a story on hybrid cochlear implants.

When I looked up she was sweeping her left hand in an arc, taking in all the students, tapping her thumb and index finger together. It was the ASL “do” sign, meaning, in combination with her tilted head and quizzical expression, “What shall we do now? What’s next?”

Now I knew her background, her history, her interests. It gave her depth, dimension, a local habitation, and a name. I looked at her, thinking: Wow, a deaf science writer. Just like me.

Nosy? Invasive? Perhaps just a little. But I was a visitor from the other side of the country. Knowing something about her would help me smooth my way into a conversation. Anyway, I figured the day was coming when it would be considered rude not to Google someone upon meeting them. One could discover mutual interests so much more quickly that way.

I went up to her after class to ask her about the complexities of teaching math in American Sign Language. It was easy to steer the conversation to our mutual interest in writing. Our conversation began that day, both by email and in person, and it has never stopped.

But when I was standing in the Mission District amidst the ruckus of faded awnings and shouting children, all that was in the past. I missed my BlackBerry. I kept reaching for the holster, expecting to feel the device’s rounded plastic edges and their slight warmth from my body. Forget your Blackberry, I told myself. Look about you. Pay attention to the sights and smells of the world.

I walked about, nosed into stores, and ate lunch at my favorite taqueria. But it troubled me how separate the two worlds of my experience were. My BlackBerry offered me an infinite supply of information and messages. The material world offered me infinite sensation and variety, and the faces and voices of my friends. It seemed altogether wrong that each world could be experienced only by excluding the other. Surely, I thought, there must be a way to bring them together.

© 2011 Michael Chorost

Edition details

• Publisher: Free Press
• Publication date: 2011
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1439119147
• ISBN 13: 9781439119143
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 256