Now that I’ve got my website revamped, I thought I’d introduce myself and talk about how I write science.

I got into science writing in an unusual way. I was trained as an academic, completing my Ph.D. in educational technology in 2000. In the summer of 2001 my life came to a halt when I abruptly lost my hearing due to some unknown cause. A few months later I got a cochlear implant in my left ear. When my audiologist first showed me an implant without its ceramic casing I thought, “Oh my God, it really is a computer.” It was a microchip implanted in my skull with 16 electrodes triggering my auditory nerve.

It sounded completely different from anything I’d ever heard before. Radios were gibberish, clocks were eerily loud, toilet flushings were explosions. But I gradually learned how to hear all over again. I wrote my way through the experience, keeping a diary that grew into my first book, Rebuilt: How Becoming Part Computer Made Me More Human (the softcover has the subtitle My Journey Back to the Hearing World.)

In Rebuilt, I aimed to combine the personal narrative and technical exposition into a coherent argument. In most science books that have a personal angle, the storyline supplements the science without substantially adding to it. It adds human interest or shows the writer’s motivations in pursuing the science. For example, Eric Kandel’s book In Search of Memory has two themes: a memoir of growing up in Nazi-dominated Europe and becoming a scientist, and a detailed explanation of the biochemical basis of memory. Both themes are excellently written, and clearly the idea of memory is explored in both. But each theme could have stood well enough on its own; it’s essentially two interleaved books. (Another example is Ronald Mallett’s Time Traveler: A Scientist’s Personal Mission to Make Time Travel a Reality.)

In Rebuilt, on the other hand, when I foregrounded my experiences hearing with my cochlear implant, I also explained why I was hearing the way I did in scientific and engineering terms, often within the same paragraph. And when I foregrounded the science, I contextualized it with my urgent need to understand how my new ear worked. For example, reading the underlying C code helped me understand why background sounds abruply went away when I started talking. Knowing that it was a deliberate artifact of the code helped me get used to it.

You might say that just as my body became an integration of hardware and flesh, my writing became an integration of engineering and personal experience.

In my new book, World Wide Mind: The Coming Integration of Humanity, Machines, and the Internet (coming out February 2011), I aimed to pull off the same integration on a higher level. I upped the ante from ear implants, which are about sensation and communication, to brain implants, which are about cognition and control. I traveled the country meeting engineers developing implanted chips that let paralyzed people communicate. I read about the idea of threading thousands of tiny wires into the brain via the bloodstream. I looked in on scientists developing a whole new generation of probes that let them observe and control brain activity in unprecedented detail. (This became a Wired story, which I then developed in more detail as Chapter 8 of the book.)

Obviously I couldn’t write about such technologies from personal experience. But clearly they were extraordinarily intimate interfaces. That was why people reacted so strongly to the very idea of them; they breached the brain itself, directly influencing the seat of personhood, identity, and experience. On that level, memories, perceptions, and emotions all become physical processes, observable and alterable. Consciousness becomes no longer a private thing.

I didn’t claim in the book that such technologies were around the corner for anyone except drastically injured people. But they made it possible to talk concretely about observing consciously experienced events in one brain and using that information to create equivalent conscious experiences in another. They could, in principle, enable ways of knowing what another human being is seeing, feeling, and thinking in a kind of “telempathy.” In short: These new kinds of intimate interfaces raised the possibility of new kinds of intimate relationships.

But what kind of relationships? To explore what they might be, and what they might be like, I wrote about new kinds of relationships I was having. I wrote about brief but intense encounters I had with people at touch-oriented workshops, which on the surface might appear to be about sensuality but were really about connection, self-understanding, and compassion. And I wrote about meeting the woman I ultimately married (which happened just two months ago, on October 10^th.) We didn’t connect at first. It took time and patience to discover what we had in common and bond with each other.

I told these stories to show that new kinds of physical proximity enable new kinds of relationships – and brain-based interfaces would be very much a form of physical proximity. I wrote, “Such a linkage would upend the primordial assumption that I am Self, you are Other; that I am In Here, and you are Out There. The challenge to one’s identity would be terrifying but also thrilling, risky but also empowering. Any kind of contact, any penetration, confers new powers and new vulnerabilities. A computer disconnected from the Internet is safe from viruses, but it is also nearly useless. A person not in a relationship is safe from viruses, but is also alone. To obtain the benefits one also has to endure the risks.”

In the end, WORLD WIDE MIND is about creating new ways for human beings to communicate with each other, both with technology and without.

That’s how I’ve aimed to continue my exploration of a kind of science writing in which the technological and the personal are seamlessly bound together. In this blog I hope to offer mini-essays that do the same thing. I am not a scientist, so I am not qualified to use instruments like telescopes or microscopes or optogenetic probes to discover new insights about the nature of reality. But my partly electronic body is a sort of instrument that has helped me develop a unique perspective and way of thinking. I’m looking forward to seeing what new discoveries I can make with it.

Here’s a fascinating article:  Thinking like an octopus by Alvin Powell of the Harvard Gazette. Powell writes about the ideas of Peter Godfrey-Smith, a Harvard philosopher who has spent time observing octopi in the wild and in captivity.

Godfrey-Smith has noted that when an octopus is in an unfamiliar tank with food in the middle, not all of its arms do the same thing. Some of them “seem to crowd into the corner seeking safety while others seem to pull the animal toward the food, as if the creature is literally of two minds about the situation.”

The idea of a brain having more than one “mind” is not new. If the two halves of the human brain are severed, it becomes clear that the two hemispheres have very different desires and intentions. One hand buttons a shirt while the other simultaneously unbuttons it. One hand pulls down one’s trousers, while the other pulls them back up. (See Rita Carter, Mapping the Mind, p. 50).

In The Bisected Brain the neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga wrote that splitting the hemispheres “produces two separate, but equal, cognitive systems each with its own abilities to learn, emote, think, and act” (p. 2).

But the idea of an octopus having several minds is a new wrinkle. Octopi are very smart creatures. They can alter their color and skin texture to mimic the appearance and behavior of other undersea creatures such as kelp and flounder. (See, for this example, this astounding video of part of a kelp plant suddenly morphing into an octopus and fleeing from a diver.) They can change their skin color twenty times a minute, and it has been speculated that this could be a form of communication with other octopi. (See Eugene Linden, The Octopus and the Orangutan, p. 50.) Somewhat as it takes intelligence for an actor to take on gestures and accents unlike his own, an octopus may have the intelligence to observe and “inhabit” the ways of being of other creatures.

The thing with octopi, though, is that half of their 500 million neurons are in the arms rather than in the brain itself, leading Godfrey-Smith to speculate that the arms have “minds of their own.” The octopus’s intelligence may be distributed throughout its body, rather than residing wholly in the brain itself.

Godfrey-Smith speculates that learning about octopoid intelligence may help us understand which aspects of intelligence are universal and which are unique to the human species. Is it necessary for brains to be centralized in one location, as they are in humans? In what way is it important to have a unified consciousness — that is, a sense of self? Does it necessarily follow that the members of an alien technological species must have a unified sense of self?

It’s not easy to study octopi because they live in a profoundly different environment than we do. We have to be careful about not imposing our human categories of thinking onto them. Indeed, the qualifiers in the paragraph I quoted above are important: some arms “seem to” crowd into a corner while others “seem to” move toward the food. We really don’t know why the octopus is behaving as it is at that moment.

But it does raise the question of whether octopi, if left to themselves for another few hundred million years, would evolve into an intelligent species with a decentralized brain and perhaps consequently a different kind of sense of self than humans do. Personally, I’m skeptical that octopi could ascend to technological intelligence; many scientists have argued that the development of intelligence was catalyzed by the development of tools, and it’s hard to develop tools without access to fire and the metalworking it affords.

But that could just be my carbon-based, air-breathing, tool-using, bipedal-locomotion biases speaking. Perhaps there are forms of aquatic intelligence on other planets that focus on mimicry and language. Until we get to meet E.T., we really can’t know what aspects of intelligence are inherently universal.

(This was also posted on my blog at PsychologyToday.com.)