Introduction to Mind Amplifiers

I've been interested in mind amplifiers for nearly 50 years. In 1968, my senior year at Reed, I chose as my thesis topic the future of consciousness technology. Researcher Joe Kamiya at Langley Porter Neuropsychiatric hospital had reported earlier that year that he had recorded the brainwaves of experienced Buddhist monks and found that a greater than average portion of their brainwaves were attuned to a frequency of 8- 0 cycles per second — known as the “alpha” frequency. That was interesting enough, but what piqued my research was Kamiya’s report that he had measured the brainwaves of ordinary subjects who were not experienced meditators but who would hear a tone when their brainwaves were in the alpha zone. Kamiya’s subjects were able to learn how to control the frequency of their brainwaves because his machinery enabled them to become continuously aware of them — what became known as “biofeedback.” I procured an ancient encephalograph, an oscilloscope, and my roommate, the late Richard Crandall, who later became a fabled Reed professor and best friend of Steve Jobs, helped me connect and test it. While it was cool to make a tone sound by controlling my brainwaves, what excited me the most was that this could be the beginning of a real science of consciousness. LSD had convinced me of the importance of consciousness-change, but these new electronic devices seemed to me more objective, precise, “scientific.” I was thinking beyond what experiments should be done next, but on where the electronic amplification of consciousness might lead… in the future.

I started to get interested in computers as potential mind amplifiers when I discovered Alan Kay's seminal 1977 Scientific American article, Microelectronics and the Personal Computer. That article led me to Xerox PARC, where they were developing the first graphical user interfaces computers that Steve Jobs and Bill Gates later emulated with Macintosh and Windows. PARC led me to Bob Taylor, Doug Engelbart, and JCR Licklider, all of whom I interviewed for my 1985 book, Tools for Thought. What I had thought of as mind amplification, Engelbart termed "augmentation of human intellect." In 2012, combining my interest in cooperation theory and intellectual augmentation, I wrote, at the invitation of TED, a short e-book that was intended to bring designers of mind amplifiers up to speed on the social and psychological and political issues that engineers don't necessarily learn. Here is my primer on the key texts of mind amplification:

Engelbart and others were stimulated to think about information-processing tools as knowledge implements when they read Vannevar Bush's article, As We May Think, in the August, 1945 Scientific American: 

"The summation of human experience is being expanded at a prodigious rate, and the means we use for threading through the consequent maze to the momentarily important item is the same as was used in the days of square-rigged ships."

In 1960, MIT scientist JCR Licklider, a psychoacoustician, frustrated by all the record-keeping, number crunching, and data-arranging that scientific research required, wrote Man-Computer Symbiosis:

"Man-computer symbiosis is an expected development in cooperative interaction between men and electronic computers. It will involve very close coupling between the human and the electronic members of the partnership. The main aims are 1) to let computers facilitate formulative thinking as they now facilitate the solution of formulated problems, and 2) to enable men and computers to cooperate in making decisions and controlling complex situations without inflexible dependence on predetermined programs. In the anticipated symbiotic partnership, men will set the goals, formulate the hypotheses, determine the criteria, and perform the evaluations. Computing machines will do the routinizable work that must be done to prepare the way for insights and decisions in technical and scientific thinking. Preliminary analyses indicate that the symbiotic partnership will perform intellectual operations much more effectively than man alone can perform them. Prerequisites for the achievement of the effective, cooperative association include developments in computer time sharing, in memory components, in memory organization, in programming languages, and in input and output equipment.

Licklider became the director of ARPA's Information Processing Techniques Office, which was charged with sponsoring research to do what Bush and Licklider had wished for -- reinvent computing. One of the first steps was to start developing what became known as computer graphics -- not only displaying images on screens and manipulating those images with computers, but actually using the images to control the computers. As his MIT thesis, Ivan Sutherland invented computer graphics -- which he later further developed at the University of Utah -- with his demo, Sketchpad. Check out this video of Sketchpad, narrated by Alan Kay, one of those who turned Sutherland's discovery into the graphic user interface.

One of the projects Licklider and his successor, Bob Taylor, funded was Doug Engelbart's Augmentation Research Center at Stanford Research Institute. When I read Engelbart's Augmenting Human Intellect and then met him, I understood that the mind amplifier was becoming a reality:

"Our culture has evolved means for us to organize the little things we can do with our basic capabilities so that we can derive comprehension from truly complex situations, and accomplish the processes of deriving and implementing problem solutions. The ways in which human capabilities are thus extended are here called augmentation means, and we define four basic classes of them:

Artifacts -- physical objects designed to provide for human comfort, for the manipulation of things or materials, and for the manipulation of symbols.

Language -- the way in which the individual parcels out the picture of his world into the concepts that his mind uses to model that world, and the symbols that he attaches to those concepts and uses in consciously manipulating the concepts (”thinking”).

Methodology -- the methods, procedures, strategies, etc., with which an individual organizes his goal-centered (problem-solving) activity.

Training -- the conditioning needed by the human being to bring his skills in using Means 1, 2, and 3 to the point where they are operationally effective.

The system we want to improve can thus be visualized as a trained human being together with his artifacts, language, and methodology. The explicit new system we contemplate will involve as artifacts computers, and computer-controlled information-storage, information-handling, and information-display devices. The aspects of the conceptual framework that are discussed here are primarily those relating to the human being's ability to make significant use of such equipment in an integrated system."

Engelbert built his mind amplifier and showed it the world in what became known as "the mother of all demos." Definitely check out these video excerpts if you want to see what blew the minds of 1968's computer designers.

In 2012, TED invited me to write an e-book and I decided to write Mind Amplifier, a short primer for those interested in the subject, especially designers of future mind amplifiers.

Instead of asking whether the Web is making us stupid, Howard Rheingold turns that question around and asks how designing and using digital media mindfully could make us smarter. What if humans could build tools that leverage our ability to think, communicate, and cooperate? Humans invented social learning, speech, writing, alphabets, printing, computers, and the Internet, which means we should be systematically directing the evolution of intellectual augmentation. Mind Amplifier: Can Our Digital Tools Make Us Smarter? examines the origins of digital mind-extending tools, and then lays out the foundations for their future. Rheingold proposes an applied, interdisciplinary science of mind amplification. He also unveils a new protocol for developing techno-cognitive-social technologies that embrace empathy, mindfulness, and compassion - elements lacking from existing digital mind-tools

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