The Future of the Mind Read Free

who had lived through the Depression and World War II, so this cameas no surprise. (I thought to myself that it would have been truly amazing if he had been thinking of President Millard Fillmore.)
    Still, it stoked my imagination, and I couldn’t resist experimenting with telepathy on my own, trying to read other people’s minds by concentrating as hard as I could. Closing my eyes and focusing intently, I would attempt to “listen” to other people’s thoughts and telekinetically move objects around my room.
    I failed.
    Maybe somewhere telepaths walked the Earth, but I wasn’t one of them. In the process, I began to realize that the wondrous exploits of telepaths were probably impossible—at least without outside assistance. But in the years that followed, I also slowly learned another lesson: to fathom the greatest secrets in the universe, one did not need telepathic or superhuman abilities. One just had to have an open, determined, and curious mind. In particular, in order to understand whether the fantastic devices of science fiction are possible, you have to immerse yourself in advanced physics. To understand the precise point when the possible becomes the impossible, you have to appreciate and understand the laws of physics.
    These two passions have fired up my imagination all these years: to understand the fundamental laws of physics, and to see how science will shape the future of our lives. To illustrate this and to share my excitement in probing the ultimate laws of physics, I have written the books Hyperspace, Beyond Einstein , and Parallel Worlds . And to express my fascination with the future, I have written Visions, Physics of the Impossible , and Physics of the Future . Over the course of writing and researching these books, I was continually reminded that the human mind is still one of the greatest and most mysterious forces in the world.
    Indeed, we’ve been at a loss to understand what it is or how it works for most of history. The ancient Egyptians, for all their glorious accomplishments in the arts and sciences, believed the brain to be a useless organ and threw it away when embalming their pharaohs. Aristotle was convinced that the soul resided in the heart, not the brain, whose only function was to cool down the cardiovascular system. Others, like Descartes, thought that the soul entered the body through the tiny pineal gland of the brain. But in the absence of any solid evidence, none of these theories could be proven.
    This “dark age” persisted for thousands of years, and with good reason. The brain weighs only three pounds, yet it is the most complex object inthe solar system. Although it occupies only 2 percent of the body’s weight, the brain has a ravenous appetite, consuming fully 20 percent of our total energy (in newborns, the brain consumes an astonishing 65 percent of the baby’s energy), while fully 80 percent of our genes are coded for the brain. There are an estimated 100 billion neurons residing inside the skull with an exponential amount of neural connections and pathways.
    Back in 1977, when the astronomer Carl Sagan wrote his Pulitzer Prize–winning book, The Dragons of Eden , he broadly summarized what was known about the brain up to that time. His book was beautifully written and tried to represent the state of the art in neuroscience, which at that time relied heavily on three main sources. The first was comparing our brains with those of other species. This was tedious and difficult because it involved dissecting the brains of thousands of animals. The second method was equally indirect: analyzing victims of strokes and disease, who often exhibit bizarre behavior because of their illness. Only an autopsy performed after their death could reveal which part of the brain was malfunctioning. Third, scientists could use electrodes to probe the brain and slowly and painfully piece together which part of the brain influenced which behavior.
    But the basic tools of