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

by Michio Kaku (Author)

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#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The renowned theoretical physicist and national bestselling author of The God Equation tackles the most fascinating and complex object in the known universe: the human brain.

“Compelling…Kaku thinks with great breadth, and the vistas he presents us are worth the trip.” —The New York Times Book Review

The Future of the Mind brings a topic that once belonged solely to the province of science fiction into a startling new reality. This scientific tour de force unveils the astonishing research being done in top laboratories around the world—all based on the latest advancements in neuroscience and physics—including recent experiments in telepathy, mind control, avatars, telekinesis, and recording memories and dreams. The Future of the Mind is an extraordinary, mind-boggling exploration of the frontiers of neuroscience. Dr. Kaku looks toward the day when we may achieve the ability to upload the human brain to a computer, neuron for neuron; project thoughts and emotions around the world on a brain-net; take a “smart pill” to enhance cognition; send our consciousness across the universe; and push the very limits of immortality.

Print length

400 pages
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English
Publisher

Anchor
Publication date

February 17, 2015
Dimensions

5.16 x 0.85 x 7.94 inches
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0307473341
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978-0307473349
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Editorial Reviews

Review

Praise for The Future of the Mind, #1 New York Times Bestseller

“Compelling…Kaku thinks with great breadth, and the vistas he presents us are worth the trip.”
—The New York Times Book Review

“Intriguing….extraordinary findings…A fascinating sprint through everything from telepathy research to the 147,456 processors of the Blue Gene computer, which has been used to simulate 4.5% of the brain’s synapses and neurons.”
—Nature

“Fizzes with his characteristic effervescence….Fascinating….. For all his talk of surrogates and intelligent robots, no manufactured being could have a fraction of his charisma.”
—The Independent

“A mind-bending study of the possibilities of the brain....a clear and readable guide to what is going on at a time of astonishingly rapid change.”
—The Telegraph

“In this expansive, illuminating journey through the mind, theoretical physicist Kaku (Physics of the Future) explores fantastical realms of science fiction that may soon become our reality. His futurist framework merges physics with neuroscience... applied to demonstrations that “show proof-of-principle” in accomplishing what was previously fictional: that minds can be read, memories can be digitally stored, and intelligences can be improved to great extents. The discussion, while heavily scientific, is engaging, clear, and replete with cinematic references.... These new mental frontiers make for captivating reading.”
—Publishers Weekly

“Kaku turns his attention to the human mind with equally satisfying results…Telepathy is no longer a fantasy since scanners can already detect, if crudely, what a subject is thinking, and genetics and biochemistry now allow researchers to alter memories and increase intelligence in animals. Direct electrical stimulation of distinct brain regions has changed behavior, awakened comatose patients, relieved depression, and produced out-of-body and religious experiences… Kaku is not shy about quoting science-fiction movies and TV (he has seen them all)… he delivers ingenious predictions extrapolated from good research already in progress.”
—Kirkus Reviews

“Facts to ponder: there are as many stars in our galaxy (about 100 billion) as there are neurons in your brain; your cell phone has more computing power than NASA had when it landed Apollo 11 on the moon. These seemingly unrelated facts tell us two things: our brains are magnificently complex organisms, and science fiction has a way of becoming reality rather quickly. This deeply fascinating book by theoretical physicist Kaku explores what might be in store for our minds: practical telepathy and telekinesis; artificial memories implanted into our brains; and a pill that will make us smarter. He describes work being done right now on using sensors to read images in the human brain and on downloading artificial memories into the brain to treat victims of strokes and Alzheimer’s. SF fans might experience a sort of breathless thrill when reading the book—This stuff is happening! It’s really happening!—and for general readers who have never really thought of the brain in all its glorious complexity and potential, the book could be a seriously mind-opening experience.”
—Booklist

Praise for Physics of the Future

"[A] wide-ranging tour of what to expect from technological progress over the next century or so.... fascinating—and related with commendable clarity" —Wall Street Journal

"Mind-bending...Kaku has a gift for explaining incredibly complex concepts, on subjects as far-ranging as nanotechnology and space travel, in language the lay reader can grasp....engrossing" —San Francisco Chronicle

"Epic in its scope and heroic in its inspiration" —Scientific American

"[Kaku] has the rare ability to take complicated scientific theories and turn them into readable tales about what our lives will be like in the future.... Fun...fascinating. And just a little bit spooky" —USA Today

Praise for Physics of the Impossible

"An invigorating experience" —The Christian Science Monitor

“Kaku's latest book aims to explain exactly why some visions of the future may eventually be realized while others are likely to remain beyond the bounds of possibility.... Science fiction often explores such questions; science falls silent at this point. Kaku's work helps to fill a void.” —The Economist

“Mighty few theoretical physicists would bother expounding some of these possible impossibilities, and Kaku is to be congratulated for doing so.... [He gets] the juices of future physicists flowing.” —Los Angeles Times

About the Author

MICHIO KAKU is a professor of physics at the City University of New York, cofounder of string field theory, and the author of several widely acclaimed science books, including Hyperspace, Beyond Einstein, Physics of the Impossible, and Physics of the Future. He is the science correspondent for CBS's This Morning and host of the radio programs Science Fantastic and Explorations in Science.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Houdini believed that telepathy was impossible. But science is proving
Houdini wrong.

   Telepathy is now the subject of intense research at universities around
the world, where scientists have already been able to use advanced sensors to
read individual words, images, and thoughts in a person’s brain. This could
alter the way we communicate with stroke and accident victims who are
“locked in” their bodies, unable to articulate their thoughts except through
blinks. But that’s just the start. Telepathy might also radically change the way
we interact with computers and the outside world.

   Indeed, in a recent “Next 5 in 5 Forecast,” which predicts five revolutionary
developments in the next five years, IBM scientists claimed that we will
be able to mentally communicate with computers, perhaps replacing the
mouse and voice commands. This means using the power of the mind to call
people on the phone, pay credit card bills, drive cars, make appointments,
create beautiful symphonies and works of art, etc. The possibilities are endless,
and it seems that everyone— from computer giants, educators, video
game companies, and music studios to the Pentagon— is converging on this
technology.

   True telepathy, found in science-fiction and fantasy novels, is not possible
without outside assistance. As we know, the brain is electrical. In general,
anytime an electron is accelerated, it gives off electromagnetic radiation. The
same holds true for electrons oscillating inside the brain, which broadcasts
radio waves. But these signals are too faint to be detected by others, and
even if we could perceive these radio waves, it would be difficult to make
sense of them. Evolution has not given us the ability to decipher this collection
of random radio signals, but computers can. Scientists have been able
to get crude approximations of a person’s thoughts using EEG scans. Subjects
would put on a helmet with EEG sensors and concentrate on certain
pictures— say, the image of a car. The EEG signals were then recorded for
each image and eventually a rudimentary dictionary of thought was created,
with a one- to- one correspondence between a person’s thoughts and the EEG
image. Then, when a person was shown a picture of another car, the computer
would recognize the EEG pattern as being from a car.

   The advantage of EEG sensors is that they are noninvasive and quick.
You simply put a helmet containing many electrodes onto the surface of the
brain and the EEG can rapidly identify signals that change every millisecond.
But the problem with EEG sensors, as we have seen, is that electromagnetic
waves deteriorate as they pass through the skull, and it is difficult to locate
their precise source. This method can tell if you are thinking of a car or a
house, but it cannot re- create an image of the car. That is where Dr. Jack Gallant’s
work comes in.

VIDEOS OF THE MIND

The epicenter for much of this research is the University of California at
Berkeley, where I received my own Ph.D. in theoretical physics years ago. I
had the pleasure of touring the laboratory of Dr. Gallant, whose group has
accomplished a feat once considered to be impossible: videotaping people’s
thoughts. “This is a major leap forward reconstructing internal imagery. We
are opening a window into the movies in our mind,” says Gallant.

   When I visited his laboratory, the first thing I noticed was the team of
young, eager postdoctoral and graduate students huddled in front of their
computer screens, looking intently at video images that were reconstructed
from someone’s brain scan. Talking to Gallant’s team, you feel as though you
are witnessing scientific history in the making.

   Gallant explained to me that first the subject lies flat on a stretcher, which
is slowly inserted headfirst into a huge, state- of- the- art MRI machine, costing
upward of $3 million. The subject is then shown several movie clips (such
as movie trailers readily available on YouTube). To accumulate enough data,
the subject has to sit motionless for hours watching these clips, a truly arduous
task. I asked one of the postdocs, Dr. Shinji Nishimoto, how they found
volunteers who were willing to lie still for hours on end with only fragments
of video footage to occupy the time. He said the people in the room, the grad
students and postdocs, volunteered to be guinea pigs for their own research.
As the subject watches the movies, the MRI machine creates a 3- D image
of the blood flow within the brain. The MRI image looks like a vast collection
of thirty thousand dots, or voxels. Each voxel represents a pinpoint of neural energy, and the color of the dot corresponds to the intensity of the signal and blood flow. Red dots represent points of large neural activity, while blue dots represent points of less activity. (The final image looks very much like thousands of Christmas lights in the shape of the brain. Immediately you can see that the brain is concentrating most of its mental energy in the visual cortex, which is located at the back of the brain, while watching these videos.)

   Gallant’s MRI machine is so powerful it can identify two to three hundred distinct regions of the brain and, on average, can take snapshots that have one hundred dots per region of the brain. (One goal for future generations of MRI technology is to provide an even sharper resolution by increasing the number of dots per region of the brain.)

   At first, this 3- D collection of colored dots looks like gibberish. But after
years of research, Dr. Gallant and his colleagues have developed a mathematical
formula that begins to find relationships between certain features of a picture (edges, textures, intensity, etc.) and the MRI voxels. For example, if you look at a boundary, you’ll notice it’s a region separating lighter and darker areas, and hence the edge generates a certain pattern of voxels. By having subject after subject view such a large library of movie clips, this mathematical formula is refined, allowing the computer to analyze how all sorts of images are converted into MRI voxels. Eventually the scientists were able to ascertain a direct correlation between certain MRI patterns of voxels
and features within each picture.

   At this point, the subject is then shown another movie trailer. The computer
analyzes the voxels generated during this viewing and re- creates a rough approximation of the original image. (The computer selects images from one hundred movie clips that most closely resemble the one that the subject just saw and then merges images to create a close approximation.) In this way, the computer is able to create a fuzzy video of the visual imagery going through your mind. Dr. Gallant’s mathematical formula is so versatile that it can take a collection of MRI voxels and convert it into a picture, or it can do the reverse, taking a picture and then converting it to MRI voxels.

   I had a chance to view the video created by Dr. Gallant’s group, and it was
very impressive. Watching it was like viewing a movie with faces, animals,
street scenes, and buildings through dark glasses. Although you could not
see the details within each face or animal, you could clearly identify the kind
of object you were seeing.

   Not only can this program decode what you are looking at, it can also
decode imaginary images circulating in your head. Let’s say you are asked to
think of the Mona Lisa. We know from MRI scans that even though you’re
not viewing the painting with your eyes, the visual cortex of your brain will
light up. Dr. Gallant’s program then scans your brain while you are thinking
of the Mona Lisa and flips through its data files of pictures, trying to find the
closest match. In one experiment I saw, the computer selected a picture of
the actress Salma Hayek as the closest approximation to the Mona Lisa. Of
course, the average person can easily recognize hundreds of faces, but the
fact that the computer analyzed an image within a person’s brain and then
picked out this picture from millions of random pictures at its disposal is
still impressive.

   The goal of this whole process is to create an accurate dictionary that
allows you to rapidly match an object in the real world with the MRI pattern
in your brain. In general, a detailed match is very difficult and will take years,
but some categories are actually easy to read just by flipping through some
photographs. Dr. Stanislas Dehaene of the Collège de France in Paris was
examining MRI scans of the parietal lobe, where numbers are recognized,
when one of his postdocs casually mentioned that just by quickly scanning
the MRI pattern, he could tell what number the subject was looking at. In
fact, certain numbers created distinctive patterns on the MRI scan. He notes,
“If you take 200 voxels in this area, and look at which of them are active
and which are inactive, you can construct a machine-learning device that
decodes which number is being held in memory.”

   This leaves open the question of when we might be able to have picture quality
videos of our thoughts. Unfortunately, information is lost when a
person is visualizing an image. Brain scans corroborate this. When you compare
the MRI scan of the brain as it is looking at a flower to an MRI scan
as the brain is thinking about a flower, you immediately see that the second
image has far fewer dots than the first. So although this technology will
vastly improve in the coming years, it will never be perfect. (I once read a
short story in which a man meets a genie who offers to create anything that
the person can imagine. The man immediately asks for a luxury car, a jet
plane, and a million dollars. At first, the man is ecstatic. But when he looks at
these items in detail, he sees that the car and the plane have no engines, and
the image on the cash is all blurred. Everything is useless. This is because our
memories are only approximations of the real thing.)

   But given the rapidity with which scientists are beginning to decode the
MRI patterns in the brain, will we soon be able to actually read words and
thoughts circulating in the mind?

READING THE MIND

In fact, in a building next to Gallant’s laboratory, Dr. Brian Pasley and his
colleagues are literally reading thoughts— at least in principle. One of the
postdocs there, Dr. Sara Szczepanski, explained to me how they are able to
identify words inside the mind.

   The scientists used what is called ECOG (electrocorticogram) technology,
which is a vast improvement over the jumble of signals that EEG scans
produce. ECOG scans are unprecedented in accuracy and resolution, since
signals are directly recorded from the brain and do not pass through the
skull. The flipside is that one has to remove a portion of the skull to place a
mesh, containing sixty-four electrodes in an eight-by-eight grid, directly on
top of the exposed brain.

   Luckily they were able to get permission to conduct experiments with
ECOG scans on epileptic patients, who were suffering from debilitating seizures.
The ECOG mesh was placed on the patients’ brains while open- brain
surgery was being performed by doctors at the nearby University of California
at San Francisco.

   As the patients hear various words, signals from their brains pass through
the electrodes and are then recorded. Eventually a dictionary is formed,
matching the word with the signals emanating from the electrodes in the
brain. Later, when a word is uttered, one can see the same electrical pattern. This correspondence also means that if one is thinking of a certain word, the
computer can pick up the characteristic signals and identify it.
With this technology, it might be possible to have a conversation that
takes place entirely telepathically. Also, stroke victims who are totally paralyzed
may be able to “talk” through a voice synthesizer that recognizes the
brain patterns of individual words.

   Not surprisingly, BMI (brain- machine interface) has become a hot field,
with groups around the country making significant breakthroughs. Similar
results were obtained by scientists at the University of Utah in 2011. They
placed grids, each containing sixteen electrodes, over the facial motor cortex
(which controls movements of the mouth, lips, tongue, and face) and
Wernicke’s area, which processes information about language. The person was then asked to say ten common words, such as “yes” and “no,” “hot” and “cold,” “hungry” and “thirsty,” “hello” and “good- bye,” and “more” and “less.” Using a computer to record the brain signals when these words were uttered, the scientists were able to create a rough one- to- one correspondence between spoken words and computer signals from the brain.

   Later, when the patient voiced certain words, they were able to correctly
identify each one with an accuracy ranging from 76 percent to 90 percent.
The next step is to use grids with 121 electrodes to get better resolution.
In the future, this procedure may prove useful for individuals suffering
from strokes or paralyzing illnesses such as Lou Gehrig’s disease, who would
be able to speak using the brain- to- computer technique.

TYPING WITH THE MIND

At the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, Dr. Jerry Shih has hooked up epileptic
patients via ECOG sensors so they can learn how to type with the mind.
The calibration of this device is simple. The patient is first shown a series
of letters and is told to focus mentally on each symbol. A computer records
the signals emanating from the brain as it scans each letter. As with the other
experiments, once this one- to- one dictionary is created, it is then a simple
matter for the person to merely think of the letter and for the letter to be
typed on a screen, using only the power of the mind.

   Dr. Shih, the leader of this project, says that the accuracy of his machine
is nearly 100 percent. Dr. Shih believes that he can next create a machine to
record images, not just words, that patients conceive in their minds. This
could have applications for artists and architects, but the big drawback of
ECOG technology, as we have mentioned, is that it requires opening up
patients’ brains.

   Meanwhile, EEG typewriters, because they are noninvasive, are entering
the marketplace. They are not as accurate or precise as ECOG typewriters,
but they have the advantage that they can be sold over the counter. Guger
Technologies, based in Austria, recently demonstrated an EEG typewriter at
a trade show. According to their officials, it takes only ten minutes or so for
people to learn how to use this machine, and they can then type at the rate
of five to ten words per minute.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Anchor; Reprint edition (February 17, 2015)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 400 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0307473341
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0307473349
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 13.4 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.16 x 0.85 x 7.94 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #150,884 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #32 in Scientific Research
- #227 in Popular Neuropsychology
- #456 in Cognitive Psychology (Books)

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Michio Kaku is the co-founder of String Field Theory and is the author of international best-selling books such as Hyperspace, Visions, and Beyond Einstein. Michio Kaku is the Henry Semat Professor in Theoretical Physics at the City University of New York.

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Fascinating

Reviewed in the United States on October 10, 2014

Verified Purchase

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.

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Joseph J. Truncale

A very interesting and fascinating book on the mind and reality.

Reviewed in the United States on May 24, 2021

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As someone whose curiosity knows no bounds for more than 7 decades I have had the pleasure of reading thousands of books on a wide variety of topics. Lately, I have been reading quite a few books by Michio Kaku and just finished reading this fascinating 377 page soft cover volume (The future of the mind: The scientific quest to understand, enhance, and empower the mind by Michio Kaku) which I purchased on Amazon for a bargain price.

This great book explores the many mysteries and unanswered questions surrounding our mind. This text is organized into three (book) areas. In book 1: The mind and consciousness covers unlocking the mind and consciousness-a physicist’s viewpoint. Book 2: Mind over matter deals with questions about telepath, telekinesis mind controlling matter, memories and thoughts made to order, Einstein’s brain and enhancing our intelligence. Book 3: Altered consciousness explores in your dreams, can the mind be controlled, altered states of consciousness, the artificial mind, reverse engineering, the future: mind beyond matter, the mind as pure energy, the alien mind and concluding remarks. The appendix section explains Quantum consciousness.

This is the kind of book that once you begin reading it you cannot put it down. I read this book in one sitting because I found it so interesting and informative. The somewhat controversial subject of whether we can really know and understand consciousness I found disturbing as well as the issue of whether or not we really have free will.

In any case, if you interested in how our brains really work and how scientists are discovering more about our brains every day you may want to check out this book.
Rating: 5 Stars. Joseph J. Truncale (Author: Tactical Principles of the most effective Combative Systems).

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R.K.Sarma

FANTASTIC VOYAGE THROUGH MIND

Reviewed in India on August 15, 2022

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I liked the detailed explanation of the functioning of the brain. Journey through various possibilities of mind control and thought transfer are very interesting.
Book will be of interest to all fans of science as well futurologists.

Judyta Szacillo-Haslett

science or sci-fi?

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 13, 2019

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Yet again, Michio Kaku has delivered well. I'm still under the charm of his witty style, endlessly providing food for thought. He is not only a populariser - he is a visioner, and crazy enough at that to make me wonder whether I should perhaps tag his book on Goodreads as 'fantasy/sci-fi' instead of 'natural sciences'. Tagging has its limitations; I can't create a category for Kaku alone, even though he certainly deserves it.

One thing that did not sit well with me while reading this book was Kaku's tendency to look at humans in distinctly different terms than at the rest of the animals. Other animals do things simply 'by instinct'; humans are directed by 'unconscious calculations made by their brains' (I fail to grasp the difference). On a few occasions, Kaku's way of phrasing indicates that he doesn't see other animals as capable of feeling pain or distress. I believe it's just a careless phrasing, because he contradicts it elsewhere in the book, but that lack of care should not have taken place there. We are not as far removed from the other mammals as Kaku indicates. I think it is important to understand that if we want to take Kaku's advice and start merging with machines and artificially boosting our intelligence.

One paragraph made me laugh out loud as I realised that even such a brilliant mind as Kaku's lives in its own bubble. He complains a bit throughout the book that mathematical brilliance does not boost one's income, and his only hope for an artificially improved mind to make some extra money is to assume that it would also include artistic genius 'which could conceivably be used to make a comfortable living'. As a wife of a very talented painter whose works far exceed in quality all the amorphous blobs currently in fashion, I can definitely confirm that artistic genius does not generate income any better than mathematical brilliance! :-)

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Amazon Kunde

Habe es gekauft zur Vorbereitung aufs Abi

Reviewed in Germany on May 1, 2017

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War sehr leicht zu verdauen. Keine spezifische Fachbegriffe nötig um gut verstehen zu können um was es in diesem Buch geht. Ein Interesse an übersinnlichen Fähigkeiten wird gestillt. Ist im Ganzen sehr vielseitig und beschränkt sich nicht auf ein zentrales Thema. In meinem Fall habe ich es gekauft, weil ich sehr lesefaul bin :/ jedoch ist es für ein gutes Englisch ein muss sich Bücher zu kaufen und diese zu lesen. So lern man am schnellsten und effektivsten. Kann schon vorkommen das man einzelne Wörter im Lexikon nach schlagen muss aber war bei mir eher selten. Macht Spaß zum Lesen und kann weiter empfehlt werden.

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Marcos

The future of Neuroscience - an incredible view of the present and future technology

Reviewed in Brazil on November 28, 2014

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The Future of the Mind is really about the future of different theories, studies and technologies dealing directly or in some way with the human brain. This book is a must read if you want to be aware of what’s already happening in Neuroscience and the possibilities ahead.

Although for many this book may sound like to sci-fi, many of the crazy sounding ideas are already technologies being developed in some laboratory around the world. What would you think if someone told you it is actually possible to record your dreams in video? What about connecting someone’s brain to someone else’s, in the same fashion we connect computers? Well, it’s actually being done, although in very simple ways – after all, they’re all works in progress. This idea was mentioned, decades ago, in a fiction book called Brainetic, by Ennio Pedroso, and I was thrilled to know this may actually be possible in a not so distant future.

Dr Kaku also mentions the advances made in connecting a disabled person’s brain to an exoskeleton and what this kind of technology means to thousands of people around the world, who will be able to walk by themselves without the aid of a wheelchair.

I highly recommend this outstanding book to everyone interested in science and in what we’ll be seeing as ready to go technology in the not so distant future.

lemme

Very good book !

Reviewed in France on October 1, 2015

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Althought Michio Kaku is a not a specialist in neuoscience, as a physicist he describes simply and precisely the future of human mind. I find in this book a complete summary of what i've not really understand in other essays.
I particularly appreciate the chapter on telepathy, and the way to alter and enhance the mind.
Suggested reading are also very interesting.

Thank you

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