2011 Nobel Conference Preview-Chorost

As a pre-cursor to this year's Nobel Conference ("The Brain and Being Human"), technology theorist Michael Chorost was invited to deliver his talk entitled "World Wide Mind: How to Connect Your Brain to the Internet (And Would You Want To)".

In 2001, Chorost went completely deaf and had a computer implanted in his head to allow him to hear again. This transformative experience inspired his first book, Rebuilt: How Becoming Part Computer Made Me More Human. He wrote about how mastering his new ear, a cochlear implant, enabled him to enhance his creative potential as a human being. In 2006, the book won the PEN/USA Book Award for Creative Nonfiction.

In his second book, World Wide Mind: The Coming Integration of Humanity, Machines, and the Internet, he proposes that humanity can incorporate the computer into its collective soul in a way that enhances communities and creative work instead of diminishing them.

Chorost holds a B.A. from Brown University and a Ph.D. from the University of Texas-Austin. As a freelance science writer he has written for Wired, The Washington Post, Technology Review, and The Scientist. He wrote the screenplay for a television special on brain implants titled The 22nd Century, which aired on PBS. He sits on external advisory boards for neuroscience research at Northwestern and Brown and has given more than 85 talks at institutions such as Google, MIT, Stanford, Brown, and the Brookings Institute.

The Nobel Conference is the first ongoing educational conference in the United States to have the official authorization of the Nobel Foundation in Stockholm, Sweden. The Nobel Conference links a general audience with the world's foremost scholars and researchers in conversations centered on contemporary issues related to the natural and social sciences.

Category:

Education

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• Michael Chorost
• Nobel Conference
• Gustavus Adolphus College
• Brain
• cochlear implant