The Future of the Mind (2 page)

Paul McMillan, director of Space Watch

Fulvia Melia, astronomer, University of Arizona

William Meller, author of
Evolution Rx

Paul Meltzer, National Institutes of Health

Marvin Minsky, MIT, author of
The Society of Minds

Hans Moravec, author of
Robot

Late Phillip Morrison, physicist, MIT

Richard Muller, astrophysicist, University of California at Berkeley

David Nahamoo, IBM Human Language Technology

Christina Neal, volcanist

Miguel Nicolelis, neuroscientist, Duke University

Shinji Nishimoto, neurologist, University of California at Berkeley

Michael Novacek, American Museum of Natural History

Michael Oppenheimer, environmentalist, Princeton University

Dean Ornish, cancer and heart disease specialist

Peter Palese, virologist, Mount Sinai School of Medicine

Charles Pellerin, NASA official

Sidney Perkowitz, author of
Hollywood Science

John Pike,
GlobalSecurity.org

Jena Pincott, author of
Do Gentlemen Really Prefer Blondes?

Steven Pinker, psychologist, Harvard University

Thomas Poggio, MIT, artificial intelligence

Correy Powell, editor of
Discover
magazine

John Powell, founder of JP Aerospace

Richard Preston, author of
Hot Zone
and
Demon in the Freezer

Raman Prinja, astronomer, University College London

David Quammen, evolutionary biologist, author of
The Reluctant Mr. Darwin

Katherine Ramsland, forensic scientist

Lisa Randall, Harvard University, author of
Warped Passages

Sir Martin Rees, Royal Astronomer of Great Britain, Cambridge University, author of
Before the Beginning

Jeremy Rifkin, Foundation for Economic Trends

David Riquier, MIT Media Lab

Jane Rissler, Union of Concerned Scientists

Steven Rosenberg, National Institutes of Health

Oliver Sacks, neurologist, Columbia University

Paul Saffo, futurist, Institute of the Future

Late Carl Sagan, Cornell University, author of
Cosmos

Nick Sagan, coauthor of
You Call This the Future?

Michael H. Salamon, NASA’s Beyond Einstein program

Adam Savage, host of
MythBusters

Peter Schwartz, futurist, founder of Global Business Network

Michael Shermer, founder of Skeptic Society and
Skeptic
magazine

Donna Shirley, NASA Mars program

Seth Shostak, SETI Institute

Neil Shubin, author of
Your Inner Fish

Paul Shurch, SETI League

Peter Singer, author of
Wired for War

Simon Singh, author of
The Big Bang

Gary Small, author of
iBrain

Paul Spudis, author of
Odyssey Moon Limited

Stephen Squyres, astronomer, Cornell University

Paul Steinhardt, Princeton University, author of
Endless Universe

Jack Stern, stem cell surgeon

Gregory Stock, UCLA, author of
Redesigning Humans

Richard Stone, author of
NEOs
and
Tunguska

Brian Sullivan, Hayden Planetarium

Leonard Susskind, physicist, Stanford University

Daniel Tammet, author of
Born on a Blue Day

Geoffrey Taylor, physicist, University of Melbourne

Late Ted Taylor, designer of U.S. nuclear warheads

Max Tegmark, cosmologist, MIT

Alvin Toffler, author of
The Third Wave

Patrick Tucker, World Future Society

Chris Turney, University of Wollongong, author of
Ice, Mud and Blood

Neil de Grasse Tyson, director of Hayden Planetarium

Sesh Velamoor, Foundation for the Future

Robert Wallace, author of
Spycraft

Kevin Warwick, human cyborgs, University of Reading, UK

Fred Watson, astronomer, author of
Stargazer

Late Mark Weiser, Xerox PARC

Alan Weisman, author of
The World Without Us

Daniel Wertheimer, SETI at Home, University of California at Berkeley

Mike Wessler, MIT AI Lab

Roger Wiens, astronomer, Los Alamos National Laboratory

Author Wiggins, author of
The Joy of Physics

Anthony Wynshaw-Boris, National Institutes of Health

Carl Zimmer, biologist, author of
Evolution

Robert Zimmerman, author of
Leaving Earth

Robert Zubrin, founder of Mars Society

I would also like to thank my agent, Stuart Krichevsky, who has been at my side all these years and has given me helpful advice about my books. I have always benefited from his sound judgment. In addition, I would like to thank my editors, Edward Kastenmeier and Melissa Danaczko, who have guided my book and provided invaluable editorial advice. And I would like to thank Dr. Michelle Kaku, my daughter and a neurology resident at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, for stimulating, thoughtful, and fruitful discussions about the future of neurology. Her careful and thorough reading of the manuscript has greatly enhanced the presentation and content of this book.

INTRODUCTION

The two greatest mysteries in all of nature are the mind and the universe. With our vast technology, we have been able to photograph galaxies billions of light-years away, manipulate the genes that control life, and probe the inner sanctum of the atom, but the mind and the universe still elude and tantalize us. They are the most mysterious and fascinating frontiers known to science.

If you want to appreciate the majesty of the universe, just turn your gaze to the heavens at night, ablaze with billions of stars. Ever since our ancestors first gasped at the splendor of the starry sky, we have puzzled over these eternal questions: Where did it all come from? What does it all mean?

To witness the mystery of our mind, all we have to do is stare at ourselves in the mirror and wonder, What lurks behind our eyes? This raises haunting questions like: Do we have a soul? What happens to us after we die? Who am “I” anyway? And most important, this brings us to the ultimate question: Where do we fit into this great cosmic scheme? As the great Victorian biologist Thomas Huxley once said, “The question of all questions for humanity, the problem which lies behind all others and is more interesting than any of them, is that of the determination of man’s place in Nature and his relation to the Cosmos.”

There are 100 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy, roughly the same as the number of neurons in our brain.
You may have to travel twenty-four trillion
miles, to the first star outside our solar system, to find an object as complex as what is sitting on your shoulders. The mind and the universe pose the greatest scientific challenge of all, but they also share a curious relationship. On one hand they are polar opposites. One is concerned with the vastness of outer space, where we encounter strange denizens like black holes, exploding stars, and colliding galaxies. The other is concerned with inner space, where we find our most intimate and private hopes and desires. The mind is no farther than our next thought, yet we are often clueless when asked to articulate and explain it.

But although they may be opposites in this respect, they also have a common history and narrative. Both were shrouded in superstition and magic since time immemorial. Astrologers and phrenologists claimed to find the meaning of the universe in every constellation of the zodiac and in every bump on your head. Meanwhile, mind readers and seers have been alternately celebrated and vilified over the years.

The universe and the mind continue to intersect in a variety of ways, thanks in no small part to some of the eye-opening ideas we often encounter in science fiction. Reading these books as a child, I would daydream about being a member of the Slan, a race of telepaths created by A. E. van Vogt. I marveled at how a mutant called the Mule could unleash his vast telepathic powers and nearly seize control of the Galactic Empire in Isaac Asimov’s
Foundation Trilogy
. And in the movie
Forbidden Planet
, I wondered how an advanced civilization millions of years beyond ours could channel its enormous telekinetic powers to reshape reality to its whims and wishes.

Then when I was about ten, “The Amazing Dunninger” appeared on TV. He would dazzle his audience with his spectacular magic tricks. His motto was “For those who believe, no explanation is necessary; for those who do not believe, no explanation will suffice.” One day, he declared that he would send his thoughts to millions of people throughout the country. He closed his eyes and began to concentrate, stating that he was beaming the name of a president of the United States. He asked people to write down the name that popped into their heads on a postcard and mail it in. The next week, he announced triumphantly that thousands of postcards had come pouring in with the name “Roosevelt,” the very same name he was “beaming” across the United States.

I wasn’t impressed. Back then, the legacy of Roosevelt was strong among those who had lived through the Depression and World War II, so this came
as 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 in
the 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 neuroscience did not provide a systematic way of analyzing the brain. You could not simply requisition a stroke victim with damage in the specific area you wanted to study. Since the brain is a living, dynamic system, autopsies often did not uncover the most interesting features, such as how the parts of the brain interact, let alone how they produced such diverse thoughts as love, hate, jealousy, and curiosity.

TWIN REVOLUTIONS

Four hundred years ago, the telescope was invented, and almost overnight, this new, miraculous instrument peered into the heart of the celestial bodies. It was one of the most revolutionary (and seditious) instruments of all time. All of a sudden, with your own two eyes, you could see the myths and dogma of the past evaporate like the morning mist. Instead of being perfect examples of divine wisdom, the moon had jagged craters, the sun had black spots, Jupiter had moons, Venus had phases, and Saturn had rings. More was learned about the universe in the fifteen years after the invention of the telescope than in all human history put together.