Who first came up with the global brain idea?
As the variety of names indicates, many people have independently developed the idea of society as an organism with its own nervous system, each adding their own insights to our understanding of the global brain. Simplistic analogies between a social system and the body, such as “the king is the head”, “the farmers are the feet”, date back at least to the Ancient Greeks and the Middle Ages. This analogy provided inspiration to the 19th century founders of sociology, being developed perhaps most extensively by Herbert Spencer (see his “Society is an Organism”). The evolutionary theologist Teilhard de Chardin was probably the first to focus on the mental organization of this social organism, which he called the “noosphere”. Around the same time, the science fiction writer H. G. Wells proposed the concept of a “world brain” as a unified system of knowledge, accessible to all. The term “global brain” seems to have been first used in 1983 by P. Russell. The first people to have made the con
