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

  1. Creative Nets in the Precambrian Era
  2. Networking in Paleontology's "Dark Ages"
  3. The Embryonic Meme
  4. From Social Synapses to Social Ganglions: Complex Adaptive Systems in Jurassic Days
  5. Mammals and the Further Rise of Mind
  6. Threading a New Tapestry
  7. A Trip through the Perception Factory
  8. Reality Is a Shared Hallucination
  9. The Conformity Police
  10. Diversity Generators: The Huddle and the Squabble--Group Fission
  11. The End of the Ice Age and the Rise of Urban Fire
  12. The Weave of Conquest and the Genes of Trade
  13. Greece, Miletus, and Thales: The Birth of the Boundary Breakers
  14. Sparta and Baboonery: The Guesswork of Collective Mind
  15. The Pluralism Hypothesis: Athens' Underside
  16. Pythagoras, Subcultures, and Psycho-Bio-Circuitry
  17. Swiveling Eyes and Pivoting Minds: The Pull of Influence Attractors
  18. Outstretch, Upgrade, and Irrationality: Science and the Warps of Mass Psychology
  19. The Kidnap of Mass Mind: Fundamentalism, Spartanism, and the Games Subcultures Play
  20. Interspecies Global Mind
  21. Conclusion: The Reality of the Mass Mind's Dreams: Terraforming the Cosmos

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