Global Brain

The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century

By: Howard Bloom

Narrated by: Malcolm Hillgartner

In this extraordinary follow-up to the critically acclaimed The Lucifer Principle, Howard Bloom - one of today's preeminent thinkers - offers us a bold rewrite of the evolutionary saga. He shows how plants and animals (including humans) have evolved together as components of a worldwide learning machine. He describes the network of life on Earth as one that is, in fact, a "complex adaptive system," a global brain in which each of us plays a sometimes conscious, sometimes unknowing role. And he reveals that the World Wide Web is just the latest step in the development of this brain. These are theories as important as they are radical.

Informed by twenty years of interdisciplinary research, Bloom takes us on a spellbinding journey back to the big bang to let us see how its fires forged primordial sociality. As he brings us back via surprising routes, we see how our earliest bacterial ancestors built multitrillion-member research-and-development teams a full 3.5 billion years ago. We watch him unravel the previously unrecognized strands of interconnectedness woven by crowds of trilobites, hunting packs of dinosaurs, flocks of flying lizards, troops of baboons making communal decisions, and adventurous tribes of protohumans spreading across continents but still linked by primitive forms of information networking. We soon find ourselves reconsidering our place in the world. Along the way, Bloom offers us exhilarating insights into the strange tricks of body and mind that have organized a variety of life forms: spiny lobsters, which, during the Paleozoic Era, participated in communal marching rituals; and bees, which, during the age of dinosaurs, conducted collective brainwork. This fascinating tour continues on to the sometimes brutal subculture wars that have spurred the growth of human civilization since the Stone Age. Bloom shows us how culture shapes our infant brains, immersing us in a matrix of truth and mass delusion that we think of as reality.

Global Brain is more than just a brilliantly original contribution to the ongoing debate on the inner workings of evolution; it is a "grand vision," says the eminent evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson, a work that transforms our very view of who we are and why.

©2015 Howard Bloom (P)2015 Blackstone Audio, Inc.

Well written, but originally written in 2000

The first half of the book had me really excited, but being a book written in 2000, it struggled to maintain relevancy at the end. It's certainly still worth the read, and the narrator was excellent. I expected the book to culminate better at the end. I think the conclusion could have been stronger.

some very high highs but some rather low lows too

it starts if great chatting creation but he goes off the rails with spurious science and his somewhat unhelpful global brain analogy

not too engaging

The topic is interesting and the book was OK, it just wasn't my cup of tea.

Exhausting and Exhaustively Elaborate

I forced myself to listen to this entire audiobook, aided in the endeavor by an impromptu roadtrip. This is a mentally exhausting listen as you're assailed by endless chapters droning on to increasingly infinitesimal, facsimile points. The treasure of knowledge gained by enduring the repertoire of monotonous buildup becomes increasingly less rewarding as the size of the chapters mercilessly increases. Somewhere in the middle of the book, the author abandons his grasp on the narrative of cordial, linearly specific subject matter and starts delving into borderline nonsense, as if he himself somehow losses grasp on the very reality he is narrating, and just went for the high-score word count. This is proven by getting a print copy of this book, hitting CTRL - F, and typing in "Prostitute." My impression is that this book could have been half the length and kept 80% of the knowledge intact. Is the last 20% of the knowledge worth double the time investment? Only you, as the individual listener, may be able to answer this question. That hurdle aside, the knowledge gleamed from this book is substantial in the pursuit of knowledge related to social structures and why we make the decisions we do, and how much of our decision making is influenced by the social groups we identify ourselves with. Combining an understanding of microbiology, chemistry, and anthropology, the author attempts to build up a massive pyramid of understanding of how our modern-day behavior is likened to the earliest microbial life-forms, and our decisions and actions in social structures traces its roots back to the basic actions of group transmission of messages to communicate threats and adapt to survive. 3/5ths of the book spirals back and forth creating a complex theory involving Microbes, Monkeys, and the Romans. From the tendency for microbes to cluster and bifurcate in the need to be in the company of its peers, to the scavenging and herd effects of monkey, chimpanzee, baboon, and earlier Native Americans, to finally the complexities of the ultra-rigid lifestyle of the Spartan soldier and the more free-thinking, ultra-liberal lifestyle of the Pythagoreans. If you manage to go this far in the book, I think you will have gleamed most of the useful information. The author himself mentally checks out as well at this part, hence the liberal presence of the word "Prostitute." that appears. Continued participation in the audio book is just partaking and sharing in the experience of the hazing ritual that the author must have subjected themselves to in the process of creating this book. If you decide to continue after this point, your subjecting yourself to another 10 chapters of tedium and 6 hours of listening. Beware. Finally, the major takeaway from this novel is that because of our collective herd mentality that we have inherited from microbes, communities will vote against their own interests to stay in accordance with the herd consensus. Additionally, the democratic, free-thinking lifestyle of the Pythagoreans and the ultra-rigid structure of the Spartans will always be entangled and in competition for each other in all communities, even in modern-day times. So sometimes, it's okay to be liberal and sometimes it's okay to be rigid. The rigidness of social structures act as bump stops to keep a community from self-destructing from the fall out of a liberal lifestyle. However, the liberal lifestyle is necessary to understand and evolve from the acumen of resources gathered from the adherence to an ultra-rigid spartan lifestyle. I am so done with this review. Good luck and God Bless you.

Genius.

Howard Bloom is without doubt one of this worlds most brilliant minds. This book is fascinating and eye opening. One of the BEST books ever, The other book of comparable talent is Howard Blooms other masterpiece " The Lucifer Principal ". I highly recommend both books to everyone. Howard Bloom has a lot to teach us we should all be paying attention.

Interesting but Redundant

Some cool ideas in here but for some reason the author recites the same quote about “those that haveth gain more, those that don’t haveth all taken away” around 7-9 times. While the quote is thought provoking, isn’t one of the meta goals of a “global brain” to evolve out of the unjust inequality embodied by the quote? I fail to understand why the author wants to celebrate this “might makes right” ethos with seems backwards and outdated.

The conclusions are not convincing - easy to vary

The stories and facts that constitute the book are convincing and conventional. The conclusions drawn seem to me easy to vary, in a manner ditasted by David Deautch (see BOI).

Helped Spur the Philosophy of Broader Survival

This is where I realized that all of life uses the Three Lower Strategies of Broader Survival: Population Increase, Population Diversity, and Population Dispersal (the Three Higher coming later, emerging with Higher Consciousness: Extended Reason, Broader Proaction, and Higher Technology.
Beyond that, the book was eye-opening concerning nature and other species, and entertaining.

interesting but confused wandering falls short

A good amount of key facts littered in here make a listen worthwhile but, unfortunately, the confused use of terminology taken from one area of the world and applied to another without any modification or clarification leaves the whole book a sloppy mess more likely to misguide readers than educate them; the author fails to elucidate the elusive principle he purports to show by his surface survey of worldly features.

Scientifically, historically glorious

Digging into microbes, bacteria, aquatic life, humans and sooo many other species and learning of their interconnectivity throughout history was glorious! I enjoyed every moment of it!