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

Published by: Free Press
Release Date: February 15, 2011
Pages: 256
ISBN13: 978-1439119143
Overview
What if digital communication felt as real as being touched?
This question led Michael Chorost to explore profound new ideas triggered by lab research around the world, and the result is the book you now hold. Marvelous and momentous, World Wide Mind takes mind-to-mind communication out of the realm of science fiction and reveals how we are on the verge of a radical new understanding of human interaction.
Chorost himself has computers in his head that enable him to hear: two cochlear implants. Drawing on that experience, he proposes that our Paleolithic bodies and our Pentium chips could be physically merged, and he explores the technologies that could do it.
He visits engineers building wearable computers that allow people to be online every waking moment, and scientists working on implanted chips that would let paralysis victims communicate. Entirely new neural interfaces are being developed that let computers read and alter neural activity in unprecedented detail.
But we all know how addictive the Internet is. Chorost explains the addiction: he details the biochemistry of what makes you hunger to touch your iPhone and check your email. He proposes how we could design a mind-to-mind technology that would let us reconnect with our bodies and enhance our relationships. With such technologies, we could achieve a collective consciousness – a World Wide Mind. And it would be humankind’s next evolutionary step.
With daring and sensitivity, Chorost writes about how he learned how to enhance his relationships by attending workshops teaching the power of touch. He learned how to bring technology and communication together to find true love, and his story shows how we can master technology to make ourselves more human rather than less.
World Wide Mind offers a new understanding of how we communicate, what we need to connect fully with one another, and how our addiction to email and texting can be countered with technologies that put us – literally – in each other’s minds.
Praise
"Michael Chorost is not only a clear and concise science writer, but also a visionary. The coming integration of humans and machines may be a bit further off than he thinks, but he convinced me that we will get there someday."
—The New York Times, Feb. 15, 2011. Full review
"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."
—Appletell, March 12, 2011. Full review
"World Wide Mind is a thought-provoking story about how technology will connect with the brain ever more intimately, merging humanity and the internet, providing technologically shared experiences and emotions. It forces the reader to think again – not just about neuro-technology but also about communication, about how important eye-to-eye and body-to-body contact is."
—New Scientist, Feb. 19, 2011. Full review
"Brain-to-brain communication is the standard stuff of science fiction, but Chorost attempts to outline the engineering path towards feasibly realising this much-fantasised communicative ability and, more importantly, he explains how it could deepen human communication. Yes, there are several science bits that you can’t really skip, but the surprising thing is that, even to this non-techie, Chorost makes it so readable and convincing."
—The Irish Times, June 18, 2011. Read the article
"In the end, you may react to World Wide Mind as diverting science fiction, as a speculative but plausible look into an exciting future, or even as a work of horror. Whatever your response, it's hard to imagine many who won't find this book fascinating."
—Civil Engineering, May 2011. Full review
"Chorost presents a unique argument: we biologically and emotionally crave deep intimacy with each other, and although we don’t recognize it in ourselves, we yearn for precisely the same kind of constant connectivity with each other that machines enjoy...Chorost’s writing is clear, visionary and romantic."
—Big Think, Feb. 16, 2011. Full review
"Chorost takes pains to lay out recent advances in relevant brain and software technology without sensationalizing them....The upshot of the research Chorost details is nothing less than a pathway to telepathy, telempathy and a linked world consciousness...The real triumph of the book derives from Chorost's storytelling ability."
—The L Magazine, Feb. 16, 2011. Full review
Named as a Notable Nonfiction Book in Scientific American’s February 2011 issue.
“An adroit overview of the progress in joining together computers and humans… Chorost makes a stimulating case that implanted computers might propel humans to the next step in evolution.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“His tour of here-and-now neuroscience makes for an engaging account of how the brain communicates with itself and the world.”
—Publishers Weekly
“In World Wide Mind, Michael Chorost takes on a daunting challenge: seriously and factually examining what it would mean to connect human minds directly through technology. Until recently the realm of science fiction, this task is of increasing importance as our inventions even now blur the boundary between the made and the born. Chorost’s greatest achievement is in making his tale not one about transistors and neuroscience, but about the future of humanity and love.”
—Joel Garreau, Author, Radical Evolution: The Promise and Peril of Enhancing Our Minds, Our Bodies – And What It Means to Be Human
“World Wide Mind is a rare pleasure indeed: a smart book about the future of technology that is really about the complexities of the human heart and the universal yearning to be transformed by connection. By combining cutting-edge neuroscience, keen insight into the social potential of networks, and touchingly candid personal anecdotes, Chorost has written one of the most memorable and thought-provoking books of the year.”
—Steve Silberman, Contributing editor, Wired
“Michael Chorost is one of the most thoughtful writers confronting a major question of the 21st century: how will the ability to engineer human minds change the the way we live, communicate, and love? As a cyborg himself, Chorost has a unique perspective that enables him to foresee how mind technologies will impact everyday issues of existence. This is a remarkable book for its ability to ponder neuroengineering through the wisdom of a humanistic lens.”
—Ed Boyden, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, MIT Media Lab
“A deeply personal exploration of individuality, connection, and the brain. Chorost does an impressive job of articulating how brain-to-brain communication could become real, and of exploring its implications for all of us. Moving, insightful, and provocative.”
—Ramez Naam, Author, More Than Human: Embracing the Promise of Biological Enhancement
Backstory
When I finished my first book, Rebuilt, I faced the question every first-time author faces: Now what?
The question was especially acute for me because Rebuilt had been a lucky shot. When I suddenly lost all of my remaining hearing on July 7, 2001, a ready-made narrative dropped into my lap. There’s a lot of inherent drama in losing one’s hearing and getting it back with a cochlear implant. With a story like that, it wasn’t hard for me to find an agent and get a book contract.
I was very lucky in a number of ways. I was lucky that there was a ready-made treatment at hand that really worked; my hearing is better with my cochlear implants than it ever was with the various hearing aids I had worn for 33 years. I was lucky that I lived ten minutes away from one of the country’s best cochlear implant clinics. And I was lucky in that the book gave me the chance to become the kind of writer that I had always dreamed of being.
I had always made a living at the keyboard as a graduate student and as a writer of technical reports, but it wasn’t writing that nourished my soul. Rebuilt let me expand into writing about dazzling technologies and their effects on human relationships.
When the book came out, it changed my life. It let me join a national conversation about technology and human values. I was invited to give talks all over the country and to write articles for my favorite magazines. In early 2005 I decided to quit my job and focus on doing that kind of work fulltime as a freelancer. Ever since, I have had the extraordinary privilege of conversing with people all over the country about where technology is taking us as a species.
Naturally, I wanted to write a second book – but about what? Rebuilt had been an easy ticket, a free ride. Now I would have to work at finding a topic.
One kind of story came immediately to mind. Shortly after Rebuilt came out I had started attending communications workshops. My dating life had always been rocky, a sore point discussed at length in Rebuilt. I didn’t feel confident about myself. I didn’t feel that I was good at establishing intimacy. I didn’t feel that I understood touch or body language. So when a trusted friend of mine told me that there as a school for learning how to become better at just such things, I gave it a try.
My first class was full of new experiences. I was challenged to try things I’d never tried before. It was frankly edgy. I was wary of it being a cult. But the teachers came across as being gentle and nondirective. People were encouraged to decide where their boundaries were and to sit out exercises they didn’t feel comfortable doing. Dissent was welcomed and appreciated. After a while I began to relax and enjoy the ride. I signed up for more classes.
For me it was amazing to discover that people could be systematically taught about communication, boundaries, self-awareness, body language, and touch. There was a great deal of structured talking and listening. There was also a great deal of structured touch in the workshops: hugs, face-touching, massage. It went radically against the habits of self-containment and restraint that are woven into Western culture. It pushed my buttons. But it gave me a sense of how I could learn to be a warmer, calmer, and more honest person. It was precisely what I needed. And my dating life began to flower.
I asked myself: Could I write a book about this?
I tried. I wrote a proposal for a book about my workshop experiences. But soon I realized it wouldn’t fly. It was too personally about me. It didn’t let me tap into issues of interest to society.
Around that time I came across Ramez Naam’s book More Than Human, in which he outlined the neuroscientist Rodolfo Llinás’s ideas for building a brain-computer interface. One could, Llinás suggested, thread thousands of tiny wires into the brain through the bloodstream. Each wire would end up in a capillary, where it could detect the electrical activity of a few neurons. With the right software, one could begin to deduce the brain’s consciousness experience by correlating it with what the person said and did. And by sending electrical pulses to the wires, one could in principle change the brain’s conscious experience.
I was skeptical. What if the wires got tangled? What about blood clots? What if they poked through the capillary walls?
But it made me realize that it was possible to imagine, in principle, building an incredibly intimate interface with the brain. And it began to dawn on me that perhaps our civilization desired just such a thing, even if that desire hadn’t been articulated. Many people have an intense, even addictive, relationship to their email and cellphones; the average teenager sends and receives 2,272 texts per month. Our civilization wants to be wired.
Nanowires didn’t strike me as being feasible. But maybe other ways could be developed. In writing a feature for Wired I learned about an emerging technology named optogenetics, in which neurons could be genetically modified to start firing, or stop, in response to light. The technology is now giving researchers unprecedented control over neural activity. All of a sudden it is becoming feasible to see the neural basis of specific perceptions and memories.
Finally I saw the connection: A new kind of intimate interface raises the possibility of new kinds of intimate relationships. Ways of knowing what another human being was seeing, feeling, and thinking in a kind of “telempathy.” And beyond that, ways of enabling humans to act collectively in ways that might constitute a higher-level intelligence – a World Wide Mind.
Speculative ideas, of course, and very far from practical realization. But what excited me was that it was now possible to talk about them, and to do it concretely, in terms of technologies that now actually exist. I could take these ideas out of the realm of fantasy and write a “science fiction” in the best sense: a fiction that extrapolated from the known, instead of just making things up.
And to connect that up with the humane goal of using technology to build a world in which human beings can connect more richly and authentically instead of less.
I also aimed to develop a new style of writing about science. In most science books that have a personal angle, the storyline supplements the science without substantially adding to the argument. It usually adds color or shows the writer's motivations in pursuing the science. But inWorld Wide Mind the argument is carried forward, tag-team, by the personal narrative and the scientific exposition. The book depends equally on both.
There's a lot going on in World Wide Mind. I hope you will read the book, and I hope you will enjoy the ride.
Excerpts
Prologue
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 fin- gertips. 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.