The Future of the Mind: The Scientific Quest to Understand, Enhance, and Empower the Mind Paperback – February 17, 2015

The Future of the Mind: The Scientific Quest to Understand, Enhance, and Empower the Mind by Michio Kaku"The Future of the Mind" is a fascinating book on the future of the mind. Best-selling author, popular science personality on TV, and theoretical physicist Dr. Michio Kaku provides the public with a popular-science treat. What sets Kaku apart is the combination of his prodigious knowledge and innate ability to convey such complex topics in an engaging conversational tone. This captivating 400-page book includes fifteen chapters and is broken out into the following three parts (books): I. The Mind and Consciousness, II. Mind Over Matter, and III. Altered Consciousness.Positives:1. A treat to read. Popular science at its best.2. The fascinating topic of neuroscience in the masterful hands of Dr. Michio Kaku.3. Kaku is a theoretical physicist but is so well connected in the science community that is able to share great insights from some of the best minds. It's the future of the mind from the physicist's perspective.4. Great use of popular culture that connects with the audience. Kaku's mastery of the topic and the ease with which he conveys such complex topics justifies his popularity.5. The book is logically broken out into three main parts. The first part surveys the history of the brain. The second explores the new technology developed to study the brain; and the third part investigates alternate forms of consciousness.6. Presents landmark studies in neuroscience that shows how damaging specific parts of the brain causes behavioral problems. Throughout the book, Kaku presents an idea or a concept and follows it up with great examples and references to leading scientists in the field.7. Love how the book explains the structure of the brain; from the reptilian, mammalian to the cerebral cortex.8. Explanation of consciousness and the levels of consciousness. "Human consciousness is a specific form of consciousness that creates a model of the world and then simulates it in time, by evaluating the past to simulate the future. This requires mediating and evaluating many feedback loops in order to make a decision to achieve a goal."9. The accomplishments of DARPA. So much for government failure. "DARPA has been a key player in a series of inventions that have altered the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, including cell phones, night-vision goggles, telecommunications advances, and weather satellites." And of course, the precursor to the Internet, Arpanet.10. How memories are stored. "So far, scientists have identified more than twenty categories of memories that are stored in different parts of the brain, including fruits and vegetables, plants, animals, body parts, colors, numbers, letters, nouns, verbs, proper names, faces, facial expressions, and various emotions and sounds."11. Thought provoking questions throughout the book. "Is genius a function of our genes, or is it more a question of personal struggle and achievement?" Einstein as a case study.12. An interesting look at the nature of dreams.13. Debunks popular myths popularized by movies. "On the contrary, people under the influence of sodium pentathol, like those who have imbibed a few too many, are fully capable of lying."14. Fascinating look at altered states of consciousness. "Dr. V. S. Ramachandran estimates that 30 to 40 percent of all the temporal lobe epileptics whom he has seen suffer from hyperreligiosity."15. Mental illness. "Scientists from the Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital analyzed sixty thousand people worldwide and found that there was a genetic link between five major mental illnesses: schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, autism, major depression, and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Together they represent a significant fraction of all mentally ill patients."16. The intriguing topic of robots and consciousness. Stimulating discussion.17. The quest to build a brain; the three approaches to the brain.18. Is there a more interesting topic than out-of-body and near-death experiences? "Dr. Olaf Blanke and his colleagues in Switzerland may have located the precise place in the brain that generates out-of-body experiences."19. So what is aging? "Basically, aging is the buildup of errors, at the genetic and cellular level." Thank you.20. Concludes with an interesting section on philosophy and neuroscience. "We are just wetware, running software called the mind, nothing more or less. Our thoughts, desires, hopes, and aspirations can be reduced to electrical impulses circulating in some region of the prefrontal cortex. That is the Copernican Principle applied to the mind."21. Excellent supplemental material: suggested reading material, notes and an appendix on the question of quantum consciousness.Negatives:1. Oversells science. I love Dr. Kaku and his enthusiasm for science, one which I share, but sometimes I wonder if such passion leads him to overvalue what science can reasonably accomplish. Too optimistic. "One day, perhaps sometime in the next century, we will be able to transmit the consciousness of our brains throughout the solar system by placing our entire connectomes onto powerful laser beams."2. Since the book's focus is on the future; it spends a lot of time in areas of speculation or what many may consider science fiction.3. A summary of what future technologies of the mind are most likely to occur.4. More visual material would have added value. Timelines, graphs, diagrams...5. What is a soul? What characteristics does a soul possess that would enable you to empirically define it let alone define how it works?In summary, this book exemplifies why I love science so much. Dr. Kaku inspires us to dream while keeping our feet on the ground. This is what a popular-science book should be all about. Dr. Kaku shares what we currently know and speculates what is in store for the future of the mind. Perhaps too optimistic but this book is about inspiring young minds to pursue one of the greatest quests in all of science. I highly recommend it!Further recommendations: "Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100" by the same author, "How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed" and "The Singularity is Near" by Ray Kurzwell, "Who's in Charge?: Free Will and the Science of the Brain" by Michael S. Gazzaniga, "The Human Brain Book" by Rita Carter, "Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain" by David Eagleman, "The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist's Quest for What Makes Us Human" by V.S. Ramachandran, "Hallucinations" and "The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat" by Oliver Sacks, "A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future" by Daniel H. Pink, "In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind" by Eric R. Kandel, "Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain" by Antonio Damasio, and "The Mind" edited by John Brockman.

As posted on my Blog: Victoria's Reading AlcoveI personally could not wait for this book to be released. First of all, Michio Kaku, as a theoretical physicist, is one of my super heroes. Second, the whole subject of mind and consciousness and whatever it is that is going on up there fascinates me.The book was all I expected and much more. Kaku walks through the physics and the neurology of what we know about the brain, how it works, what makes things go wrong, and what makes things work better than the general population. The book is a thorough layman's guide to where we are in the study of the brain and all the things it does, or doesn't, do. And then there is the Appendix!What about free will? If our actions can be traced to some function or non-function within our mind, then how do we know we really have free will? Is everything really guided by predisposition? In his appendix, Kaku addresses how the new scientific discoveries explore both sides of the issue. Are people really helpless in their choices and the best we can do is rehabilitate or confine them? Is punishment a non-starter?According to an experiment performed by Dr. Benjamin Libet in 1985, it's possible that free will is, at the very least, not what we expect. Using EEG scan, Dr. Libet was able to determine that the brain actually makes the decision to do something prior to the conscious choice to do it. In other words, we do not act on a conscious decision, we follow along with what the brain has already decided.What does stir the process is what we know of quantum mechanics. When the probability of something being there or not becomes a factor, then our lives are not necessarily predestined, or predetermined. There is an element of change and probability in the picture that makes us individual and less predictable.One of my favorite cuts from Dr. Kaku was in a Through the Wormhole episode on consciousness. He discusses the same concept in the appendix of this book. It begins with Schrodinger's Wave Function, which won him the Nobel Prize. The math indicated that an electron could be a particle or a wave. But if it is a wave, what was it waving? Sorting this out is how Werner Heisenberg arrived at his uncertainty principle. However, Schrodinger was having none of it; the universe did not operate on probabilities. Schrodinger, wishing he had never come up with his wave function, created a thought experiment involving a cat.Place a cat in a sealed box, with a container of poison gas. In the box, there is a lump of uranium. The uranium atom is unstable and emits particles that can be detected by a Geiger counter. The counter triggers a hammer, which falls and breaks the glass, releases the gas, which can kill the cat.According to quantum mechanics, we do not know whether or not the uranium has decayed and started a sequence that will kill the poor kitty. We don't know until we open the box and observe (take a measure) the state of the cat. This is why we say that until that moment of observation, the cat is neither dead nor alive because a possibility exists for both - until the moment of measurement. Only then does the probability wave collapse into one wave - the observed state. Food for many years of theoretical debate. There were three schools of thought developed in answer to this paradox.My preferred path was developed in 1967 by Eugene Wigner. He arrived at the conclusion that only a conscious person can make the observation that collapses that wave. However, if the observer and the cat are in the same universe, then who is to say that the observer is dead or alive? Therefore there must be another conscious observer - ad infinitum. Eventually you arrive at some form of "cosmic consciousness," better known in some circles as God. Or, maybe a living, conscious universe, creating, measuring, keeping kitties healthy.Wigner's conclusion was that it was not possible to formulate the laws of quantum theory in any consistent way without reference to some form of consciousness. Someone, great or small, had to be the observer for the wave to collapse in some form of existence. This does not mean that consciousness controls reality - it only means that the act of observing (measuring) reduces the probability wave into a single wave of reality.Some people feel that the study of the mind is somehow sacrilege. I beg to differ. Time and time again in ancient sacred works, including the bible of the Christian world, we are told to observe. To look within the wonders of the universe to see the beginnings of our answers. To seek our truths. The more we know, the more we wonder.