The Worm in Our Brain

We are roughly 20 years into the Facebook Era of consensus by neotribal eyeball tally.

The Icelandic company, Flow, has been winning awards for reducing mental illness in hospitals, nursing homes, among the chronically bedridden, and even into high towers of the corporate world and the busy lives of desk jockeys in pressure positions. It works its soothing and stabilizing mental magic through guided meditations set in panoramas of Icelandic natural wonders displayed by VR headset or AR facsimile.

When NASA Scientist James Hansen appeared before the House Science Committee in 1988, he opined that we humans had embarked upon a vast experiment. The metaphor of an unsupervised laboratory experiment was not original. We had previously heard the same from other distinguished scientists — Wally Broecker at the Lamont-Doherty Observatory, Stephen Schneider at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, and Susan Solomon at NOAA’s Earth System Research Laboratories, among others.

And, four decades ago, climate change was not the only context for a vast experiment. What would be the effect of pesticides on honey bees? Of Teflon on cancer? Of accumulating radionuclides on our genetic endowment?