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Contents 1 History of the idea 2 History of the global brain 3 The global brain as a higher level of evolution 3.1 Wikipedia 4 Other names for this concept 5 Further reading 5.1 External links 5.2 See also

According to the Global Brain FAQ the idea dates back at least to the Ancient Greeks and the Middle Ages. The analogy was also used in a mythological context to describe the Hindu caste system. The current use of the term began with the publication of Peter Russell's book The Global Brain in 1983. Also see related writings by Sri Aurobindo.

According to Howard Bloom's Global Brain: the Evolution of Mass Mind From the Big Bang to the 21st Century[1], the global brain began shortly after life first evolved on this planet roughly 3.85 billion years ago. By 3.5 billion years ago, there were at least eleven species of bacteria living in colonies of trillions. Bloom cites the pioneering work of physicist and microbiologist Eshel Ben-Jacob, who showed in his 1998 paper Bacterial wisdom, Gödel's theorem and creative genomic webs that bacterial colonies function as collective intelligences. In the early seas of earth, Bloom demonstrates, those collective intelligences swapped information in the form of genetic scraps. Bacterial colonies cooperated, competed, and made war using weapons of mass destruction, chemical weapons. Battle, Bloom says, is one of the most intense forms of information exchange. Even among microorganisms, to win it's often necessary to know and ape your enemy's ways. So even conflict contributed to the web of primitive intellect. Meanwhile wind and waves carried gene fragments coding for new strategic techniques and upgrades around the globe, synapsing the creatures of earth's early seas into the first global brain.

The emergence of such a higher order system may be called a "metasystem transition" (a concept introduced by Valentin Turchin)[2] or a "major evolutionary transition" (see Szathmary and John Maynard Smith, Nature, 16 March 1995) .

• Companies that use a global brain would already have access to the knowledge held by the rest of the world, so they would no longer need non-fiction publications, consultants or specially educated employees (recall how calculators and spell-checkers have already obsolesced tiny pieces of these industries).

• Today, we have only pieces of prototypes: information aggregating markets, collaborative filtering systems, social networking systems, (etc.), so the market is best characterized as "early stage".

• Wikipedia is the dominant online volunteer community collaborating on a shared knowledge base.

Reference: factbites.com

Different people have proposed many different names for this concept of a cognitive system at the planetary level:

• global mind
• Hyper-Enlightenment by Open Media Center's David Myers
• noosphere (Teilhard de Chardin)
• planetary brain (Joël de Rosnay)
• social brain
• super-brain (Francis Heylighen)
• World Brain (H. G. Wells)

Several books, papers and websites discuss the global brain idea and its many ramifications. Most of these can be accessed via this cybernetics and systems theory website [3]. To quickly get into the heart of the matter, read the GB FAQ. For a more gentle, non-technical introduction with more background information you can read books addressed to a wide audience:

• Aurobindo, Sri - Supermind insights that anchor Involution (philosophy)
• Bloom, Howard Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind From the Big Bang To the 21st Century
• de Rosnay, Joel, The Symbiotic Man (new sciences and technologies)
• Russell, Peter The Global Brain Awakens (emphasis on philosophy and consciousness)
• Stock, Gregory Metaman (social and economic evolution)
• Sugrue, Thomas, There is a River: The Story of Edgar Cayce, ISBN 0-440-38680-2

• Peter Russell's website
• Peter Russell's website search results
• Howard Bloom's website
• Principia Cybernetica Web

• Black Iron Prison
• Gaia hypothesis
• Mediocrity principle
• Psycho-Cybernetics
• Simulated reality
• Social network