Genius of The Beast: Howard Bloom

Howard Bloom discusses his new book "The Genius Of The Beast A Radical Revision of Capitalism"

The Genius of the Beast by Howard Bloom Is global capitalism on its last legs? Is the era of American leadership over? Has the West begun a decline into a new Dark Age? Does American civilization deserve to survive? These are the unnerving questions raised by the Great Crash of 2009. A Radical Re-Vision of Capitalism.

  • Soul In the Machine: Reinventing Capitalism -- A Quick Re-vision of Western History and
  • Global Brain The Evolution of Mass Mind From the Big Bang To the 21st Century
  • The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History

Howard Bloom's Website

Some of the simple facts about Howard Bloom are as follows.....
© 1999 All Rights Reserved
  • 2010 Howard Bloom, National Space Society Board of Governors
  • been in the press since 1969
  • written for the _Washington Post_, Knight Ridder, Cosmopolitan Magazine, Omni Magazine,
  • been featured in the _New York Daily News_
  • interviewed on, shows like _Good Morning America_
  • been called a walking encyclopedia in print by _New York Magazine_
  • had over 300 articles in print
  • began writing career as a sideline to science,
  • writing and editing for other scientists,
  • edited a national magazine, elevating its circulation 211% in two years.
  • according to a master's thesis on journalism on file at Texas A&M University, a thesis written by the East Coast Editor of Rolling Stone, founded a magazine genre
  • won two National Academy of Poets prizes for another magazine
  • edited, art-directed, etc.
  • there are at least 22 pages on the Bloom-created craft of "perceptual engineering" in textbooks on the care and feeding of the press.
  • Founder of the International Paleopsychology Project;
  • Member:

International Paleopsychology Project
705 President Street - Brooklyn, NY 11215
phone 718 622 2278 - fax 718 398 2551

Teachers Interdisciplinary Science

"The mind is the conversion of molecules of matter into spiritual photons of enlightement And into spiritual pheromones of communication -- Van Philpot

THE EXTENDED BRAIN
Date: Sun, 31 Jan 1999 -- the idea that what we think of as "the brain" actually extends far beyond the gray matter in our cerebrum. First, it's pretty obvious that the brain is a mechanism in a broader meshwork within the body. To function it tunes into such things as the hpa (hypothalamic/pituitary axis) which plugs it in to the adrenal cortex down in the lower back and to the gonads, even lower in most of us. The brain also plugs in to the vagal nervous system, whose center is also well below the ribcage, to the oxytocinergic system, distributed throughout the body, and is influenced by such networks as the clocks located virtually everywhere within us and the proprioceptive centers all over the body, those receptors which tell us what position our face is in (facial expression influences mood and vice versa), what sort of gestures our fingers our making, what innner and outer cues our postural muscles are giving off, etc.

But the really interesting plug-ins are those outside the brain. One of the chapters of _Global Brain_ presents a squidgeon of the evidence showing how the tentacles of culture snake through our brain, determining its morphology in infancy, then tweaking the brain to exaltation, depression, and a variety of other moods through everything from fads, news shifts like those which accompnay such things as the explosion of the space shuttle or the Lewinskygate fiasco, and on through the alterations in music which tune the individual neurendocrinological systems of folks in a bar or a concert to a common beat and emotional tone. In a sense, the brain is merely a neuron in larger collective intelligences like that of a subculture (or multiple subcultures), an uberculture, the global intercultural mesh, and finally the interspecies global brain covered in _Global Brain's_ chapter 20. In another sense, all these collective brains are extensions of the individual brain. The boundaries of mind do not stop at the interior of the skull, not by any means.

-- Howard

PLAY

One of my personal favorites happens to be:
Frederick Erickson , a socio-linguistic micro-analyst at Interaction Lab, Grad School of Ed, U of Pennsylvania, studies Rhythmic sychrony. (Psych Today, 11/87, pp. 37-8) 36b [has observed similar phenomena]

A researcher filmed children romping in a school playground at lunch hour each seemed to be "doing his own thing."

  • BUT careful study showed that the group was moving in synchrony to a silent rhythm.
  • One Little Girl, who seemed to be moving around more than the rest,
  • was what the author of Beyond Culture calls "the [unconscious] director, the CR orchestrator" eventually, the researchers found a tune that fit the rhythm. When they played it and rolled the film, the two fit perfectly
    -- for all of the film's four and a half minutes.
  • But there was no music playing in that playground, says the author, "Without knowing it, they were all moving to a beat they generated themselves." music and rhythm are part of what draw us into the larger body of the superorganism. 31b

Howard Bloom Reviews

The Genius of the Beast by Howard Bloom Is global capitalism on its last legs? Is the era of American leadership over? Has the West begun a decline into a new Dark Age? Does American civilization deserve to survive? These are the unnerving questions raised by the Great Crash of 2009. A Radical Re-Vision of Capitalism.

Howard Bloom: Soul In the Machine: Reinventing Capitalism--A Quick Re-vision of Western History

Global Brain The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century - Howard Bloom

Howard Bloom’s Reinventing Capitalism : Putting Soul In The Machine shares something in common with his two previous critically-acclaimed books, 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 . Reinventing Capitalism is what author Leon Uris called, “An act of astonishing intellectual courage." It is what leading business author Dr. Alexander Elder called, “A brilliant, thrilling book on the human condition.” It is what Gear Magazine Publisher Bob Guccione, Jr called, “an epoch-making and culture-defining treatise.” It is what self-help author Kevin Hogan called, “The Bible…a monumental work…that has instant application in the world.” And it’s what reviewer Michael B. Leach called “nothing less than a reinterpretation of the history of civilization.” Reinventing Capitalism offers a perceptual lens with which to view our culture and our values in new ways.

Global Brain: the Evolution of Mass Mind

The Lucifer Principle was a shock to those who believe that the greed of genes turns us into selfish loners, but Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century will come as an even bigger surprise. It presents evidence that this cosmos has been "social" since its first microseconds of existence, and that the first communal intelligence appeared among colonies of cyanobacteria 3.5 billion years ago. These bacteria pioneered the first worldwide research and development system eons before the emergence of women and men.

Global Brain follows the evolution of individual and mass minds from the multi-trillion member collaborations among our bacterial ancestors to the ten-thousand-strong mass marches and claw-to-claw showdowns of ancient spiny lobsters. It demonstrates how the first birds of the Jurassic age gathered in flocks and how their descendants were so tightly data-linked that cultural fads could spread hundreds of miles through the avian grapevine in a matter of mere days.

Underpinning Global Brain's rewrite of the evolutionary saga is a new approach to social theory, one derived not from abstract principles but from observation of the real thing--living communities of all kinds--including the most fascinating of the lot: societies of human minds. Global Brain probes the rise of Stone Age cities thousands of years before Ur and Babylon, and explores how these little-known urban centers changed the very nature of human identity. It shows how transnational subcultures arose in Greece a hundred years before the glory days of Athens, and how these havens for unconventional men and women transformed the mechanism of collective creativity. Then Global Brain reveals how the sometimes brutal political stances promoted by Pythagoras, Socrates, and Plato still struggle for dominance at the turn of the 21st century.

Global Brain presents evidence that the shared intelligence of humankind is part of a larger planetary mind, one that combines the learning of microbes, waterfowl, predatory cats, idealists, militants, religionists, and scientists. The book predicts that the great world war of the 21st century will take place between the collective intelligence of humanity and that of a world wide web 96 trillion generations old and billions of years wise-the global internet between microbial societies. Finally, Global Brain anticipates some of the creative paths this planet's team of battlers and borrowers may take during the next hundred and fifty years.

Teachers | Interdisciplinary Science

REVIEWS

Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century is the follow-up to Howard Bloom's first book, The Lucifer Principle: a scientific expedition into the forces of history, which The Washington Post called "a mesmerizing mirror of the human condition," and which critic Mark Graham of Denver's Rocky Mountain Post praised as "a philosophical look at the history of our species, which alternated between fascinating and frightening. Reading it was like reading Dean Koontz or Stephen King: I couldn't put it down." Washington Post - Denver's Rocky Mountain Post

Global Brain is"a soaring song of songs about the amorous origins of the world, and its almost medieval urge to copulate."
-- Kevin Kelly editor-at-large of Wired magazine and author of Out of Control


"With this bold vision of evolution and human behavior, Bloom has raced ahead to explore possibilities that the timid scientific herd may well end up following."
-- David Sloan Wilson Evolutionary biologist and author of Unto Others: The evolution and psychology of unselfish behavior

Don Edward Beck, Ph.D.
"Howard Bloom's work is simply brilliant and there is nothing else like it, anywhere--we've looked, as have our colleagues. Global Brain is powerful, provocative, and mind-blowing."
-- Don Edward Beck, Ph.D., author of Spiral Dynamics and co-director of the National Values Center