Here’s a link to my new blog entry, Why Luke Skywalker’s arm has to talk to the brain.

Here’s how it starts: When I was a kid, I wondered how the mind controlled the body. If the mind was an airy, ethereal spirit, how did it get muscles to contract and bones to move? How, I wondered, did the ghost control the machine? Read more.

Here’s a link to my new blog posting on Psychology Today, How I kicked my addiction to the iPhone game Angry Birds.

Here’s how it begins: “After weeks of struggle, I’ve finally deleted Angry Birds from my iPhone. It is a fiendishly addictive game. The premise is simple: you “pull” back on a slingshot to fire a scowling bird at a structure with green pigs in it. The better your aim, the more damage you do and the more green pigs you kill…” Read more.

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.)

OK, here’s the latest news.

I got married on October 10th to my adorable wife Victoria, and we went to the Virgin Islands for a honeymoon. It rained most of the time! So we’re going to try again, maybe, in the deeps of winter.

WORLD WIDE MIND is in advanced stages of preparation, with just a few corrections remaining to go to the publisher. We’re still discussing the subtitle. But I’ve gotten some nice blurbs for it, and you can see them by going to Amazon’s page for the book. You can even pre-order it, if you are so minded! Official pub date is Feb. 15th, though it will probably be available sooner.

I just got back from the Society for Neuroscience conference in San Diego, where I spent four days interviewing scientists on brain-computer interfaces for a Wired feature I’m writing. SfN is a vast conference with 30,000 people and I must have walked five miles a day just getting around.

Much other travel has been going on. I also went to Lansing, Michigan to speak to a group of audiologists, and to Santa Cruz, California to address an undergraduate class. Four airplane trips in about four weeks.

I’ve contracted with a website company to revamp my website from scratch, so expect a totally new look sometime later this year.

Much going on! Stay tuned! I update with Twitter (@MikeChorost) and Facebook much more often than I do here, so feel free to watch me on Twitter and friend me on Facebook.

Sirens are howling. Philadelphia’s feelin’ rowdy tonight. I call my dorm at UPenn “Moscow State University” but it does have its charms, such as a 24th-floor lounge with a gorgeous view of the city. I plan to hole up there tonight for an hour or two rereading a galley copy of Kevin Kelly’s WHAT TECHNOLOGY WANTS, which will come out in October. It’s worth rereading; Kelly argues that technology is as authentically alive as anything in biology, and like biological things it desires to grow and evolve. More than that, he argues that life itself is baked deep into the structure of the cosmos and should emerge anywhere it gets a chance. Fascinating book. I need a big view for these big thoughts.

You should never believe an author when he says his book is “finished.” There’s always something more to do. In my case, I’m now waiting for the second-round draft to come back from my publisher, incorporating all the corrections I made in the first round. Then I’ll have to review the galley, which is the typeset version. After that there’ll be the cover artwork to inspect, the final wrangling with the publisher about the subtitle (still to be determined), and odds and ends such as the jacket copy and the author bio.

And then there’s all the publicity work: revising my website, asking fellow authors to write blurbs, lining up press attention, and asking friends to spread the word via Facebook and Twitter.

Speaking of Twitter, I’m taking it seriously at last, and composing lovely gems of 140-character wisdom for perusal by my avid followers. You can follow me @MikeChorost.

I am also working on a proposal for my third book. The book landscape is changing every single day. It’s like trying to build a house during a hurricane. I dream of creating a “native ebook”, where the book is conceived from the start as existing online, with the print version being the poor cousin. I’m considering ideas such as inline audio and video, display of reader comments in the margins, and dynamic updates where if I revise a paragraph all the book’s readers automatically see the updated version. In my more fantasy-ridden moments I’ve imagined a feature that would let me see what paragraphs are being read at any given moment so that I can text-message readers at random to see if they want to discuss. Imagine yourself reading Hamlet and Will popping up on your screen to ask you, “So what do you think? Should he be, or not be?”

Just fantasies at this stage. But fun to think about. The actual topic is, at this moment, a deeply classified secret.

In other news, I’m working on getting better networked in my new hometown of Washington D.C. by going to events and lunching with people. My long hot summer of lunches.

I finished my book, which is slated for release in early 2011. It’s not quite finished, since I still have to format the citations and do the illustrations, but it’s close enough. It’s about the prospect of reading and altering conscious experience with brainscanning devices. It’s half science, a quarter philosophy, and a quarter memoir — a sort of sequel to Rebuilt.

I also got engaged to my fabulous girlfriend Victoria. We’re planning an October wedding. Here’s a picture of us, with Elvis on my lap. We met in March 2008 while I was a visiting professor at Gallaudet.

She’s a partner at a law firm in D.C. She does consumer law, standing up for the interests of the many against the predations of the few. She has two cats, named Harper and Posy, and based on past experience we think they will get along with Elvis civilly if not enthusiastically. We are now looking for a place for the five of us in D.C.

In the wake of my book I’m doing some contract work and am back to filling up my speaking calendar. I have a couple of gigs coming up in the next few months — see the Events page. To keep up with what I’m doing on a more day-to-day level, try friending me on Facebook.

Wired’s just published my latest article, Powered by Photons, in its November 2009 issue. This article is about the emerging technology of optogenetics, which allows neuroscientists to stimulate genetically altered neurons in the brain by cell type. It’s a much more precise technology than electricity, and it can be used both to detect and control neural activity. It opens up, for the first time, the possibility of two-way prosthetic devices where the brain both sends information to, and gets information from, the artificial body part. I visted Stanford and MIT to research this story, and it’s fascinating stuff.

In other news, my book on brain implants grows apace: 66,000 words and counting. It’s due out in October 2010.

I’ve been off my blog for months now, but there’s a good reason for it: I’ve been writing for Wired and working on my second book, which is due at the end of the year. Other things have been going on, too. I spent much of the spring semester writing grant applications and teaching minicourses at Gallaudet, and (as of this week) I’ve just moved permanently to Washington D.C. When my book comes out sometime in 2010, you can count that as a BIG blog entry.