Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century
About this audiobook
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.
About the author
Howard Bloom has debated one-on-one with senior officials from Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood and Gaza’s Hamas on Iran’s al-Alam TV. He has dissected headline issues over thirty times on Saudi Arabia’s KSA2-TV, Ekhbariya TV, Economics TV, and on Iran’s global English-language Press-TV. Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Dubai’s ruler, who doubles as the prime minister of the United Arab Emirates, has named a racehorse after one of Bloom’s books. And Britain’s Channel 4 TV says Bloom is the Einstein, Newton, Darwin, and Freud of the twenty-first century.
Malcolm Hillgartner has narrated over 175 audiobooks. He was named an AudioFile Best Voice of 2013. His work ranges from children's titles such as On the Blue Comet (AudioFile Best of 2011, Earphones), and Neal Stevenson's sci-fi epic REAMDE (Audible.com Best of 2011) to the biographies Kissinger (AudioFile Best of 2013, Earphones) and Cheever (AudioFile Best of 2009, Earphones). He is also an accomplished actor, writer, and musician. With his wife and partner, Jahnna Beecham, he has written over 130 books for teens and young readers, as well as the musicals Chaps! and The Best Christmas Pageant Ever Musical, which have been produced in the U.S. and Canada.
