A book by
Howard Bloom. The full title is
Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century. 1st ed. copyright 2000, published by
John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
The book is divided into 21 chapters and a prologue, plus substantial reference sections that take up a good third of the pages of this text. This tome tells a story, the story, if you will, of life on Earth. The prologue summarizes the book nicely, and is probably worth reading again after you finish the book to give you a better handle on all the things Bloom unleashes over the course of its pages.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:
Bloom, Howard K.
The global brain: the evolution of mass mind from the big bang to the 21st century / Howard Bloom.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 0-471-29584-1 (cloth: acid-free paper)
1. Brain-Evolution. 2. Human evolution. I.Title.
Chapter summaries:
Prologue: Biology, Evolution and the Global Brain
- Creative Nets in the Precambrian Era
- Networking in Paleontology's "Dark Ages"
- The Embryonic Meme
- From Social Synapses to Social Ganglions: Complex Adaptive Systems in Jurassic Days
- Mammals and the Further Rise of Mind
- Threading a New Tapestry
- A Trip through the Perception Factory
- Reality Is a Shared Hallucination
- The Conformity Police
- Diversity Generators: The Huddle and the Squabble--Group Fission
- The End of the Ice Age and the Rise of Urban Fire
- The Weave of Conquest and the Genes of Trade
- Greece, Miletus, and Thales: The Birth of the Boundary Breakers
- Sparta and Baboonery: The Guesswork of Collective Mind
- The Pluralism Hypothesis: Athens' Underside
- Pythagoras, Subcultures, and Psycho-Bio-Circuitry
- Swiveling Eyes and Pivoting Minds: The Pull of Influence Attractors
- Outstretch, Upgrade, and Irrationality: Science and the Warps of Mass Psychology
- The Kidnap of Mass Mind: Fundamentalism, Spartanism, and the Games Subcultures Play
- Interspecies Global Mind
- Conclusion: The Reality of the Mass Mind's Dreams: Terraforming the Cosmos