Michael Jacob is a psychiatrist and neuroscientist at the University of California in San Francisco, working on a project for Human Energy about the Global Brain. He and his team are in the early stages of trying to understand parallels and differences between the functioning of individual human brains and the large-scale collective consciousness that is currently taking shape in human society — in the noosphere.
To Teilhard, understanding both the parallels and differences between a single brain and the global superorganism’s “Brain of brains”were critical to understanding his vision of how the noosphere was taking shape. He described it thusly:
“Between the human brain, with its milliards of interconnected nerve cells, and the apparatus of social thought, with its millions of individuals thinking collectively, there is an evident kinship which biologists of the stature of Julian Huxley have not hesitated to examine and expand on critical lines. On the one hand we have a single brain, formed of nervous nuclei, and on the other a Brain of brains. It is true that between these two organic complexes a major difference exists. Whereas in the case of the individual brain thought emerges from a system of nonthinking nervous fibers, in the case of the collective brain each separate unit is in itself an autonomous center of reflection. If the comparison is to be a just one we must, at every point of resemblance, take this difference into account.”
But how to take that difference into account? In 1947, when Teilhard wrote those words, available scientific methods of probing into the functioning of human brains were crude at best. In addition, the direct, electronic connectivity of the global brain was in its infancy, through radio, television, and telephone.
Today, Michael and his team have access to advanced methods of observing brain activity down to the level of individual neurons, and the direct electronic connectivity of the global brain — via the Internet and social media — is an everyday reality.
Learn more here: https://humanenergy.io/michael-jacob/
