Customer Reviews

Wired for Thought: How the Brain Is Shaping the Future of the Internet

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Mr. Stibel's "Wired for Thought: How the Brain is Shaping the Future of the Internet" kept me glued to its pages wondering what his next Internet prediction will be. He has some startling predictions about the way the Internet will be the catalyst of catalysts in accelerating human technology. The scenarios he presents will stimulate your imagination and some of them you may find a little unnerving. Can Moore's Law apply to the evolution of technology? I, for one, can't wait to find out. If a business is to survive and prosper, it must stay ahead of its competition. Wired for Thought gives you an insight into what could be in store for businesses, so that you can stay ahead of your competition.

We're due for an intellectual renaissance and, like Stibel, I feel we're experiencing the early stages of this growth with the expansion/evolution of the Internet. I applaud him for detailing this phenomenon so comprehensively, while also making it an easy read. His conclusions are just as significant in the story of human evolutionary as Donald Johanson and his team finding Lucy.

Jeff Stibel presents a clear, thought provoking premise that overlays brain evolution and biology with the birth and growth of the Internet. The analogies are very strong and if you are in business you must read this book. Why? Because the evolution of the Internet will no doubt affect the strategy of your business over the next 10 years. Jeff makes the case that the Internet is following an evolutionary path so similar to the brain that he unlocks what no doubt will be a path to our connected future. As an entrepreneur this book has opened up some new ideas for me (I see Twitter as a MEME I/O creative destruction machine now!). Business people will love this book!

"I have written this book for a broad audience...In particular, though, I have written it with the business world in mind." Wired sort of achieves that. If, as I do, you like connecting incongruent ideas together, recollecting high school anatomy and pondering internet evolution, you'll like this book. Relative to business, it does do a good job of describing some of the ways to improve search results and online advertising and to leverage the internet more effectively. But there are much more thorough books for that. However, if you are or want to be in business in the internet space itself, it's a great thought starter.

The internet is a brain because it manifests intelligence. Since there is no generally agreed upon definition of intelligence, it's hard to argue this point. Wired says it is "because the Internet...has evolved with many of the same basic structures and abilities as a brain." Axon are networks, dendrites are connectors, soma are computers, memes and memory are web sites. "There ain't much more than that...The brain's ordinariness frees us to speculate that an intelligent Internet is possible."

Wired does not go to the far edge of speculation and base its major conclusions on a conscious, self-aware thinking internet. Rather, it extends the current and increasingly more powerful ability of the internet (or rather, its web sites and software) to predict outcomes, such as what books and movies you prefer.

"As a result of its prediction capability, for example, a more personalized Internet will emerge." Search results and recommendations will get better, customer behaviors and responses will be more accurately predicted, web pages may be custom built by the internet based on predictions of what you are interested in. The result is a logical extrapolation of already occurring web intelligence.

I read the preface in the bookstore and didn't believe it (Stibel says there are computer chips that can be implanted in people's brains that can allow people to control electrical devices with their minds). Then I went online and found out he is right so I bought the book. WOW is all I can say--it has totally changed my thinking about things (and I am usually pretty stubborn). I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in learning more about the brain or the Internet.

Stibel continues to amaze and challenge the usual paradigms with well thought through theses - and makes the conclusions pragmatic as opposed to pure theory. We are clealy in a new world where the internet and humans will take massive leaps forward - this book helps plot a path. Read learn and ensure we never walk the Terminator path!!!!

Book Review: Wired for Thought by Jeffrey M Stibel

Reviewed by Georgy S Thomas


In his preface to Wired for Thought, internet pioneer and brain scientist Jeffrey M Stibel offers the following explanation for his undertaking:

''You can take away any phenomenon and study its parts for years, but until you step back far enough to see it in its entirety, you will not understand how it works and where it may go.''

Stibel's method of stepping back to view the internet is by comparing it with the human brain.

In his view, many of the biggest internet enterprises are successful because they understand the similarities between the brain and the internet. He points out the presence of brain scientists amongst decision-makers in several of the leading internet enterprises.

In the introduction, Stibel first lists out his big ideas.

* The internet is a brain because it manifests intelligence, rather than merely reflecting it.

* Humanlike thinking will emerge from the internet because of its network approach and mimicking of human weaknesses.

* The internet is an evolution of the human brain.

* The brain as a prediction machine is different from the way computers work, but is similar to the internet.
* Creative destruction is another shared trait between the brain and the internet.
* Language, considered uniquely human, is at the heart of the most important internet tool: search.
* The internet will crash, but will get bigger and stronger with each collapse. Again a trait similar to the brain.

He then takes them up in detail chapter by chapter.

Along the way, we get acquainted with concepts and terms like memes, intuition, forecasting, heuristics, fuzzy logic, polysemy, synset, spreading activation, encephalization, etc.

We also encounter a few fascinating characters like Dan Dennett, Jim Anderson (both mentors of Stibel), Robert Metcalfe (whom Stibel rather shamelessly uses as a straw man) and Ray Kurzweil.

The book is peppered with nuggets of information. For instance, did you know that many of the biggest internet properties handcode particularly important web pages for easy retrieval? I didn't until I read Stibel. On searching for confirmation on the net, I ran into a Q&A session by New York Times design director Khoi Vinh where he admitted to the practice at the Times. The shared concern seems to be that usage of web development applications like Dreamweaver and Frontpage (now Expression Web) as well as other WYSIWYG editors spoils the uniformity of the page's look and feel across various browsers.

Also when Stibel, a pioneer and one of the thought leaders of the internet revolution, lists for us the characteristic features of the best web sites, we better make a note of that.

Stibel's Evolution

Of the big ideas discussed, the one with which Stibel appears to struggle a bit seems to be the argument that the internet is the evolution of the brain.
In the beginning part of the book, while tracing the origins of cloud computing, Stibel discusses Richard Dawkins' twin ideations of the selfish genes and the selfish memes. This allows Stibel to wonder, ''Could it be, then, that the selfish gene became frustrated with the slow evolution of the human brain, and so leapt the fence from the organic world to the inorganic? Could selfish genes have created selfish memes to do their work? And is that what has led us to selfish software? Is that why humankind, imprisoned as we are in carbon molecules, is driven to invent machines made of sand and metal?''
He then goes on to answer these questions with an ''I am not completely convinced...but... the perspective is exhilarating'' approach.

But a few pages further, while discussing evolution, Stibel seems to have shed his diffidence. He says: ''The human brain evolved as a hardwired device until about 150,000 years ago, when....the mind began to outrace evolution. Rather than experiencing a radical improvement in the brain itself, humankind began to develop software _ cultural software _ that has improved over time.'' A few sentences later comes the emphatic statement, though still hanging onto the coattails of Richard Dawkins and Dan Dennett: ''...the evolution of memes is not merely analogous to genetic evolution; it's an extension of it.''

Looks like the author's views have also evolved during the course of writing the book!

In a similar vein, the book is also not completely free from factual inconsistencies. In page 74, we read the statement: ''Each neuron in the brain has about 7,000 connections, for a total of some 100 trillion connections.'' By the time we reach page 124, we read thus: ''The average neuron has roughly 10,000 connections to other neurons in the brain.'' It's evolution at work again!

The Centrality of Language for Search

The chapter on language being central to both the brain and the internet offers a fascinating insight into how search engines derive meaning from language.
Stibel is able to speak from experience because [...], a search engine which he founded, used the expanded version of a program called WordNet to do just that. He first states the problem: Choosing the right meaning of words having many possible meanings comes effortlessly for people, but is downright impossible for computers.
Then he goes on to explain how WordNet overcame the limitation by first forming a hierarchy of words, and then because words have multiple meanings, building sets of synonyms or synsets which operate together for a single meaning. WordNet then uses a process called spreading activation, or the wiring and firing together of synsets, to build context into language. Google, which acquired the knowhow through an acquisition, now uses it to power AdSense.

The Long Tail Doesn't Apply

Stibel observes how Google and other search engines tie word meanings to frequency of use for ordering and ranking results. At work here is Zipf's law, named after linguist George Kingsley Zipf. The law predicts that the more frequent words are used a great deal more than less frequent words. What this means is that as one goes down the list, there's a very rapid drop in frequency of appearance.

And it would seem that the law also applies to the degree of ambiguity of words. ''The more frequently a word appears in text, the more different meanings it has.'' Thus the most common words are also the most ambiguous. Now you know why academicians have an easy time writing technical articles for journals and a harrowing time writing an easy-to-read general interest book, Stibel tells us.

The author, mercifcully, doesn't suffer from this weakness.

The Zipf law's direct relevance to internet search is in the accessability of web pages: The most common pages are accessed very frequently, while the bulk of the web pages are almost never seen.

Based on this, Stibel goes on to state that the long tail does not generally apply to websites, internet, or search. Chris Anderson, are you listening?

The Laws of Networking

In the course of developing his big idea that the internet will shrink like the brain, Stibel lists out for us the laws of networking, seen through its three stages. Because he cannot as yet prove his contention that the internet will one day collapse, he goes on to take up case studies of networks within the internet which have experienced the three stages of growth. The lessons he draws up from this analysis are invaluable to all web entrepreneurs. Want to know why MySpace shouldn't fight its slowing growth? And what are the prospects for Facebook? Well, you've the answers in these pages.

I particularly liked Stibel's observation that ''the value of a network does not increase with size when the size of the network makes it impossible to derive value from it''. How true.

Stibel ends the book by sticking his neck out and charting out a possible path through which the internet could evolve. Does he see Google still presiding over as the lord of the world wide web manor? I'm not letting the cat out of the bag here. Better read the book and find out on your own.

e.o.m.

Wired for Thought will be a book we may look back at and revel in its insightful analysis ahead of its time. Stibel's toughts and detailed view on why we are in a continuous change and advancement provides for an exciting read. WFT is a great book for those who have been transformed by the internet as well as those who believe their lives will continue to be affected and advanced by the future of the itnernet. This book is a must read for those in business today and students studying to advance in the next chapters of their lives. One of the more transformative books on the internet ever written.

Great books change the way that we look at things. Stibel's book lays out a road map for how the internet will evolve over the next several years in a way that informs our perspective on how humanity will live and work in the future. Along the way he provides enlightening insights on various aspects of new technologies in existence today. Who ever would have thought that neuro-science could be made to be so practical?

I really enjoyed this book. The writer does a fantastic job of weaving his many years of experience with internet ventures and brain study into something educational but easy and enjoyable to read. It's science and correlations that make you think about the world you live in and the web you interact with. Reading the book made me feel like I was getting a sneak peek at the roadmap to where the web and its large companies (Google, Facebook, Myspace) will be headed in the years to come.