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:
- New York Academy of Sciences
- American Association for the Advancement of Science
- American Psychological Society
- Academy of Political Science
- Human Behavior and Evolution Society
- European Sociobiological Society
- Board member: Epic of Evolution Society

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