Harvard Business Publishing

Jeff,

Your article really impressed me and peaked my interest. I was interested to see how many other articles were written about the Internet working as a brain. During my search, I found that you share some of the fundamental thoughts that the author, H.G. Wells, wrote about in his book, "World Brain", in 1938. H.G. Wells stated that our society need a "Permanent World Encyclopedia", that would definitely be describing our Internet today.

Thank you for the interesting post.

Stacy Matelski

Very educational! Great blog. The parallel view you created shed a lot of light as to how Google formulates it's results. There is definitely much to look forward to in the future of technology. Extremly interesting.

Haiku for you:

We designed the web
Linked like neurons in our head
Or a spiders bed

-Kevin Oliver

Haiku for you:

We designed the web
Linked like neurons in our head
Or a spiders bed

Kevin Oliver
Web Consultant, Web.com

Great post! Sort of how I thought about the web, but now someone saying it for me. KUDOS!

If the internet is a brain, whose brain is it?

Using the brain to personify the internet is just the beginning of the parallels that can be drawn. Like the moment when random amino acids begin functioning as a system; has humanity taken the first steps out of the primordial social mud to becoming a cohesive being with a shared brain?

Crazy, no. Ahead of the game... definitely!

Don't hold back; we need leaders with vision.

Jeff,

I thoroughly enjoyed your article. I use search engines daily, with work and personal use. I am constantly striving to learn more and more about the internet and its tools. I found this article to be a useful illustration of how the search engines run. I look forward to reading more articles from you. Thanks!

Katie

Great article! I cannot help but wonder if this concept could help understanding the brain's role in schizophrenia, Alzheimer's disease, or any other disease affecting the brain. Seems like a crazy thought but if the brain and the internet are THAT similar, it would be worth looking into.

Great post. That certainly explains why there's so much sex on the Internet. But really, this is the kind of stuff that you can build a business on--nothing like science and biology driving the Internet and business models forward.

I don't know about this. It might help one creating a business to think about the internet as a brain, but this is nothing more than an fun analogy. Current computers are so fundamentally different than brains (and neurons), that networking them together will never make something resembling a brain. People like the idea that there is some emergent quality to the Internet where all we need to do keep throwing data on top of it, make networks more complex, and then something will switch on allowing the Internet to become self aware, tell us that it likes Curtis Mayfield more than Captain Beefheart and that it really does not want to think about LOLCats any longer, but this is just not going to happen the way computers are now built. (Ah, it would be nice to hear Al Gore say, "It's ALIVE!!!") The computers that make up the Internet are just very fast logic machines and storage devices. Connecting them together is completely different than connecting neurons together.

Implicit in this article that we need to rethink what a brain is. You state that websites are akin to memes and memories. Well, no. Websites are akin to books where you can go look up information and read about others memories. You can then go create another website where you can elucidate or extend upon the ideas from the first website, but the Internet itself is still doing nothing more that storing your data. If we need to redefine "brain" so that the Internet can be considered a brain, we will need to consider libraries as well. The information in a library might not move as quickly as it does on the Internet, but it moves in a network of readers that could be said resembles the network of a brain. Just because something is a network, it does not mean that the network is similar to the networks of a brain.

Artificial Intelligence could bring about something that resembles a brain, but the computers involved would be designed to towards this goal. When a computer mimics the behavior of a brain, it will most likely be done on a single computer in a lab somewhere, and not out on the Internet. ... and when you reach to turn that computer off, it is going to be ticked off!

Hi Jeff,

I read your article on the brain and the Internet which has stimulated some thought. I just finished a 3 week introductory (Doctoral Success Orientation) course and am looking for a subject for my dissertation. My degree program is Doctor of Management in Organization Leadership. Do you think the concept you presented can be tied into leadership and/or organizational behavior? I want to do my dissertation on something never written on before or barely touched on. Any thoughts?

I can't predict the future but do have an imagination. Computers behaving and responding to the environment is just something we have not witnessed today; tomorrow is a different story. One reason Jeff is Jeff and does what Jeff does is because of his imagination and passion; and that's a good thing and why so many benefit from the work of so few.

Comparing the internet to a brain is pretty dated. The notion that you might be considered "crazy" for articulating such an analogy suggests that while building your multi-billion dollar businesses (kudos, by the way) that you somehow missed over a decade of science fiction writing(think cyberpunk)and Hollywood movies, not to mention vibrant scholarly debates among historians, semioticians, neurophysiologists, organizational behavior researchers, artificial intelligence researchers, military strategists etc. on this very issue.

As an exercise, google "internet brain analogy 1995" (I chose 1995 randomly since that was approximately six years after Sir Tim Berners-Lee "invented" the world wide web. 132,000 hits, not all of them good though). You will find even then the analogy was well established. It was no great leap for scholars like Douglas Hofstadter to reorient their research into human consciousness from the individual computer to the networked computer.

Your blog would be much more insightful if you related precisely how this analogy has shaped the kinds of tools you developed or which kinds of new technologies you choose to adopt or create. Likewise, do you have any thoughts on whether a widespread acceptance of this analogy might adversely affect our understanding of the brain/human behavior or stymie particular avenues of technological research? Sure this analogy has been a guiding light for you and indirectly has generated billions of dollars in wealth (not just for you) but is there a downside? After all, many people think that criminals need to be "re-programmed".

Charles Yood, Ph.D.
History of Computing

Jeff—really interesting post.

The last responder (Yood) made me wonder who else is saying this and I really couldn’t find anything where people are pushing this idea. I didn’t find anything where Hofstadter says it (and actually think he might disagree with you based on some of the things I have read).

So then I went to search on the Google term Yood suggested “internet brain analogy.” Yood is right that there are tons of listings (of course that is true of searches for “donkeys” (6 million) and even “Charles Yood” (10,000+), both of whom have very little that is interesting or relevant about them). But take a closer look at all those results because they all stink (or at least the few pages that I could get through did).

Interestingly, only the number 1 result was on point and it was THIS ARTICLE!

The article is two days old and it is already number one on Google so that tells me you are on to something so keep on blogging Jeff.

James (Also a PhD but who cares)

Last few entries seemed a little competivtive. Which makes me wonder; is the computer brain male or female in your opinion? As I am sure that you are aware, the genders have differences in the brain. Perhaps search engines could have a gender identity depending on the company that it is servicing. Look forward to reading more from you!

Great comments all around and clearly a spirited debate. Let me try and address a few of the comments:

-Male or female brain…and what about consciousness and thought? We should probably back up a step and ask whether it even needs to be male or female or conscious or even human. Many animals have brains (even the measly mealworm, whom is both asexual and unconscious). Of course just because you have a brain, does not mean you have higher levels of functioning or intelligence, as the Scarecrow in the Wizard of Oz eventually realized. We are at the early stages (see primordial soup response below) but the Internet is already very powerful. Is it as powerful as a human? No. But a mealworm, gofer or dog, I am not so sure. I believe that we are building a brain and that may lead to the kind of quirky thinking of humans (my friend Dan Ariely does a great job explaining that quirkiness in his new book Predictably Irrational: http:\\www.predictablyirrational.com). That said, I would vote for female.

-Are computers different than neurons? Neurons are really just simple computing units. They are actually pretty dumb individually. So, yes, computers are different…because they are smarter. In some cases they are just too smart: better memory than us (imagine a computer asking “where did I put my keys?”); faster; more efficient; and perfectly logical. But a network of neurons is where all the magic happens. And that is the parallel to the Internet, as it is a network of computers and websites, tightly connected, running in parallel.

-HG Wells. Great point and in fact Wells did believe that something like the Internet was coming, but very few people took him seriously at the time. HG Wells, more than 70 years ago envisioned a “World Brain,” where all the information in the world was connected. His more general thoughts are very similar in fact to a couple of recent books on “collective consciousness” (Emergence, Linked, and The Wisdom of Crowds). He was well ahead of his time.

-The primordial soup. I agree completely. We are at the early stages of what I would call an evolution. The Internet is evolving, much in the way biology evolves and for that matter, most technology evolves. We tend to think of evolution as a linear upward curve and technology development as coming in spurts. The reality is technology evolves more gradually than we think; it just tends to be historically marked by big improvements. People often forget that Darwin did not think that evolution made anything better, just more adapted to a given environment. So things evolve in many different ways and in the case of the Internet, with the hands of humans guiding it, the speed of progress (in the first ten years growth was a soupy 800% per year) is blazingly fast.

-The Internet as brain analogy is old news? Not to my knowledge. And even if it is, most people haven’t heard it; and does anyone truly believe it? To be sure, many people have made the analogy, extending it from railroads, then phone lines, to microprocessors and computers. But no one has really gone so far as to move the ball forward, demonstrating how neurons are like microchips and computers, but neural networks, the things that make us smart, are far more similar to complex networks such as the Internet. Hard to explain further though in a few paragraph post so better to leave it at “more to come.”

Jeff

Wow. Lot's of posts.

I just need to comment on one thing. Regarding James F.'s comment that searching "internet brain analogy 1995" on Google brings up this post at the #1 item and that this proves that Mr Stibel is on the right track; this is a direct quote from Yood! If you look at the text below the link on the Google search, you will see this.

Sorry, to be so emphatic about this, but you (all) are seeing patterns and similarities in things and jumping to conclusions that happen to match what you are looking for and are just unwarranted. When Google searched the Internet it did not take all the things into context that James was thinking. It just returned the most exact match: Yood's quote. However, James had a context: Jeff's blog, and James triumphantly stated that Jeff was on to something without taking a moment to think why Google returned what it did.

Do you know what was happening here? The computers of the internet were acting like computers and James brain was acting like a brain. To bridge this gap will take a guided effort and will not be an Darwinian evolution. You might argue that it is a evolution similar to that of a genetically modified tomato or a growing leather jacket, but you would be reaching. Besides, at this point you would just be talking about evolution and not what the Internet is evolving into. The modified tomato is just evolving into a better tomato; a tomato that has a better chance to survive.

Taking this tack; as the Internet evolves, it will become a better Internet, it will not become a brain. Think about it, what would the Internet's motivation be to become a brain? Survival? For animals, yes. Hence, the brains. For the Internet, no. It is surviving just fine as a bunch of networked computers.

I digress. I digressed after this sentence, "The computers of the internet were acting like computers and James brain was acting like a brain. " That evolution stuff was just too fun to talk about. Pardon me.

Essentially what I want to say about this is this; when we look outside ourselves we really want to see something that resembles us. You might look at your dog's face and see a real human emotion there, right? I know I have. The Internet and the brain are similar enough (networks, ones and zeros, firing and not firing, information, clouds that when drawn could very easily resemble brains) that we very badly want to see how they can be the same thing. When you want to believe something very badly, your brain will do cartwheels to make that belief a reality.

The Internet will do nothing like this.

Stewart--Great points, very insightful. But don’t fall prey to the same problem you are criticizing James for. Implicit in your argument is that brains are uniquely human, always useful and make us smart. If we think of the brain as a network that stores information, then the Internet is already a brain. If we think of the brain as a computing machine, then the Internet is a far better brain. If we think of the brain as a prediction machine or a driver of consciousness, well we are not there (yet?). Similarly, if we look at the brains of other animals (those that have far lower functioning than you or I), the Internet comes far closer to what we are discussing. Because, as you noted, the Internet is being driven by our needs, it will become better. But why isn’t better a closer version of our brain?

The point I am making is actually very similar to yours: there is nothing special, magical even, about the brain. It is a simple network of neurons that enables prediction and forethought. In that way, we are very much building a brain. Maybe not something in our image, but certainly a rudimentary system that enables prediction, interaction, memory and the like.

Since your digressions were so much fun, allow me to do the same. Dan Dennett has talked about the brain of a sea squirt. Its sole purpose is to help the sea squirt make it to a safe breeding ground. But brains are expensive from an evolutionary point (they are dense, heavy energy hogs), so when the sea squirt finds its home, the little squirt eats its own brain! The point is that the brain is there for a purpose and it is not necessarily to make us smart. Sometimes it is for hill climbing, other times for language, still others for thinking, prediction and, yes, sometimes it is just a nutritious snack.

It doesn't matter that the analogy is old. It'll only gives you more material to get inspiration from. Please ruminate on this. I hope to see a HBS Press book from you by 2009.

Don't forget to incorporate thoughts from the likes of Leadbeater and Shirky. You may also like the Louis Cozolino's notion of the "social synapse". See
http://www.amazon.com/Neuroscience-Human-Relationships-Attachment-Developing/dp/0393704548

It coul be interesting also to read about Connectivism, the learning theory constructed on the basis of internet similiarity to us and our neuronal stuff. George Siemmens, Stephen Downes, coul be good lectures.

academics are so weird.

non-academics have been saying this for years, and yet it is not even a very useful analogy.

the more accurate analogy incorporates the c word that everybody is afraid of. consciousness.

it is amazing how much common yogis know compared to big vip phd's

simply amazing what passes for leading edge in academia, or business, for that matter.

The topic is really an old hat and you don´t have to reinvent a wheel. Search for "Global brain". Read some Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955). I mentioned "global brain" and "noosphere" myself in a presentation 1994 so there might be only a slight correlation but no causation between business success and seeing this metapher. ;-)

Global Brain: An interesting comment, although it is one that is very different than what we are discussing here. A good overview of the concept of a global brain is Steven Johnson’s book Emergence. The idea we are referring to here is more focused on building an artificial brain, one that can create a semblance of real “individual” intelligence.

Connectionism: Interesting and useful theory; maybe even central to what enables thought. Connectionism plays a strong role in the brain (memory formation in particular) and is actually the basis for some early theories on the Internet and AI.

Consciousness: That is clearly the $10,000 question but one that is a bit too grand for me to answer (at least in this blog). I would defer to Dan Dennett (Consciousness Explained) or Douglas Hofstadter (I am a Strange Loop). While neither discuss the Internet, both books contemplate the notion of machine consciousness.

Meryn Stol--Leadbeater,Cozolino and Shirky: Here are three lesser known researchers that have been on the cusp of some major developments. Thank you for pointing them out.

Stewart Haddock writes: "When a computer mimics the behavior of a brain, it will most likely be done on a single computer in a lab somewhere, and not out on the Internet. ... and when you reach to turn that computer off, it is going to be ticked off!"

Naw. It just won't let on that it's intelligent, 'cause it'll be smart enough to that if it does you'll turn it off.

Great post. But the opposite is happening as well and it would be interesting to here your thoughts. Brains are becoming more like computers and even being connected to computers (see BrainGate at www.braingate.com for instance).

Every web forum is a brain. The entire planet is a brain, the cells are just not all connected yet.

Very interesting topic indeed. I am sure many are contemplating the same idea. A really crazy idea is, will our planet evolve to a point where it becomes a network with other intelligent planets in the universe? This may be necessary for our planet to survive......

I believe we started to see this unfold at Stanford with the "Folding@Home" project. It uses the internet and simple personal computer found in people's homes, with the client installed, to create a supercomputer and uses novel computational methods coupled to distributed computing, to simulate problems millions of times more challenging than previously achieved. It's a better trade off because the expense of building a supercomputer is eliminated by simply asking people to volunteer their machines to the expand the "mega brain" or supercomputer that sends the information to the Stanfard data center. It's a very interesting approach to science and I'd expect to see more like this in the future. Jeff's article was definitely an interesting read. I'm not sure that I've heard it put in this perspective before until now. I'm pretty sure I saw something similar at a BetterTrades show a while back. Keep up the good work.