<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN">
<HTML xmlns:o = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office"><HEAD>
<META http-equiv=Content-Type content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
<META content="MSHTML 6.00.2900.2627" name=GENERATOR></HEAD>
<BODY id=role_body style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt; COLOR: #000000; FONT-FAMILY: Arial"
bottomMargin=7 leftMargin=7 topMargin=7 rightMargin=7><FONT id=role_document
face=Arial color=#000000 size=2>
<DIV>Thanks to your input and to the energy you give me I've been mapping out a
theory of the extracranial extensions of the self. One part of that theory
says that when I get upset about a fight with my wife, I need to run to you
and blurt out my tale. Why? On the surface, in order to calm myself
down.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>But there's another reason. Groups with the nimblest collective
intelligence outcompete groups with lame collective brains. When I
have trouble in my trek through tough emotional terrain--like the
terrain of a relationship--I bring my report on that problem to a friend, to
you. You calm me down. In the process you follow Alice in
Wonderland's rule: "How do I know what I'm thinking until I hear what I
have to say?" You think out solutions that are useful to you and are
useful to me. In fact, you wonder when you've finished delivering your
wisdom, why you could do this miraculous problem solving for me, but you
couldn't do it for yourself.</DIV>
<DIV> <o:p></o:p></DIV>
<DIV>
<P class=MsoNormal style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt">My problem and your solution, if
we’re all very lucky, can do something remarkable.<SPAN
style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>It can become a metaphor that helps us
understand other relations that ride on shifting sands—from understanding how
particles behave or how America has to deal with our Chinese trade deficit to
understanding what a business needs to do next or to puzzling out the patterns
of signals we get from a probe on the moon of a distant planet.</P>
<P class=MsoNormal style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"> </P></DIV>
<DIV>If the tale of what I've been through makes for a really good story, and if
your solution to my problem is a triumph, too, you get excited. What
happens to us humans when we're excited. We need to share the excitement
with someone else. We need to blurt, to vent, and to brag. So
you, having helped me, call your spouse or a friend and send the tale of my
dilemma and your solution out on the seas of the grapevine, out on the seas of
gossip, out on the sea of collective information processing, collective
intelligence, and collective memory. In the process you and I help the
groups and subgroups we belong to smart.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>If we lived in a culture that forbade this sort of confession, this
constant conversation about intimacy, we'd be a lot dumber. Which my
explain why I no longer want to write What the Nuclear Knights of Islam Want
>From You: The Osama Code. Reading books on the history of Islam's founding
fathers, the Companions of the Prophet, has worn me out. How? I'm
still trying to define it, but these books dry out my brain.
They stop me from thinking. There's no introspective depth. It
is very, very hard to kill my curiosity, but the aridness of these Islamic
source books has managed to do it.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>Is that because the culture within which these books have been written is
deprived of the cross-talk that takes place when we Westernizers run into
problems--especially problems that whack us with the whips and paddles of
confusion and insecurity?</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>Meanwhile, my limbic system--and probably yours--needs to resolve its
problems with my cortical consciousness not by sending a signal a mere four
inches or so through the brain, but by going the thousands of miles it
takes to get to you. Then you explain me to my self--you complete a loop from
the turmoil of my emotional brain, my limbic system, to the somewhat
semi-calm of my talking, thinking, and writing brain, my left frontal
and pre-frontal cortex.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>If I read Jeff Hawkins' right, he says that this sort of loop creates a
memory that allows us to see the patterns of the immediate past and use those
patterns to predict the future. And memory of this sort is a vital part of
collective intelligence.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>Here's Hawkin's quote (once again). See if you think it
applies:</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>auto-associative memories in neural nets. "Instead of only passing
information forward...auto-associative memories fed the output of each neuron
back into the input.... When a pattern of activity was imposed on the
artificial neurons, they formed a memory of this pattern. ...To retrieve a
pattern stored in such a memory, you must provide the pattern you want to
retrieve. ....The most important property is that you don't have to have the
entire pattern you want to retrieve in order to retrieve it. You might
have only part of the pattern, or you might have a somewhat messed-up
pattern. The auto-associative memory can retrieve the correct pattern, as
it was originally stored, even though you start with a messy version of
it. It would be like going to the grocer with half eaten brown bananas and
getting whole green bananas in return. ...Second, unlike mist neural networks,
an auto-associative memory can be designed to store sequences of patterns, or
temporal patterns. This feature is accomplished by adding time delay to
the feedback. ...I might feed in the first few notes of 'Twinkle, Twinkle Little
Star' and the memory returns the whole song. When presented with part of
the sequence, the memory can recall the rest." Jeff Hawkins, Sandra
Blakeslee. On Intelligence. New York: Times Books, 2004: pp
46-47.<BR></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT lang=0 size=2 FAMILY="SANSSERIF" PTSIZE="10">----------<BR>Howard
Bloom<BR>Author of The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the
Forces of History and Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind From The Big Bang
to the 21st Century<BR>Visiting Scholar-Graduate Psychology Department, New York
University; Core Faculty Member, The Graduate
Institute<BR>www.howardbloom.net<BR>www.bigbangtango.net<BR>Founder:
International Paleopsychology Project; founding board member: Epic of Evolution
Society; founding board member, The Darwin Project; founder: The Big Bang Tango
Media Lab; member: New York Academy of Sciences, American Association for the
Advancement of Science, American Psychological Society, Academy of Political
Science, Human Behavior and Evolution Society, International Society for Human
Ethology; advisory board member: Youthactivism.org; executive editor -- New
Paradigm book series.<BR>For information on The International Paleopsychology
Project, see: www.paleopsych.org<BR>for two chapters from <BR>The Lucifer
Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History, see
www.howardbloom.net/lucifer<BR>For information on Global Brain: The Evolution of
Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century, see
www.howardbloom.net<BR></FONT></DIV></FONT></BODY></HTML>