Brain Wave
A fascinating 'what if novel, Brainwave is an exploration into the ways human society is organized and the assumptions that are made about how life is valued. It is also a novel about equality and what happens when the hierarchical structures by which we arrange our daily lives disappear.
Stats for nerds
3recommend
7mentions
5people
2020–2025years
57% recommend43% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- > Authors generally fail at creating characters smarter than themselves, for perhaps obvious reasons.
Hah, I've noticed that for years. Anderson's "Brain Wave", however, is a decent attempt at what more intelligent people would be like.
- Long time ago I read a novel called Brain Wave by Paul Anderson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain_Wave (it predates Flowers for Algernon by about 10 years).
It has a similar theme of suddenly acquired intelligence but for the whole planet. I you like Flowers for Algernon you'll like Brain Wave.
- I always kinda avoid scifi stories about super-intelligent beings. There's no way one could write about what they'd be like.
But I make one exception - Brain Wave by Poul Anderson. In it, ordinary people become much more intelligent. Their speech patterns change into very few words, because a more intelligent listener would be better at inferring meaning from the context.
- Another interesting story featuring enhanced intelligence is Poul Anderson's novel "Brain Wave".
Briefly, there is an energy damping field that projects in a beam from something near the center of our galaxy. One of the effects of this field is to slow down the speed of neural activity. The Sun's orbit around the galaxy takes it through this field periodically.
When it enters the field the effect is to make everything with a brain about 1/5th as smart as it was, which usually results in a mass extinction of any species that depended on its brain to survive. That's what did in the dinosaurs for instance which had been near human intelligence before that (the book is from 1954 which is before we figured out what really did them in).
Humans evolved while the Earth was in the field, evolving neurons and brain structures that can get to normal human intelligence even with the degrading effects of the field.
The start of the novel is set when Earth moves out of the field and so over the next few weeks everything with a brain gets about 5 times smarter than it was before.
That has lots of consequences. For example a lot of how we handle animals is based on the animals not being smart. It gets a lot harder to be a pig farmer, say, when your pigs get human genius level intelligence. Of course the farmer is a lot smarter too, but still it will take some time to upgrade the farm to deal with super-genius pigs and the pigs aren't going to just idly wait for that.
The novel looks at that and a ton of other changes as Earth adapts and develops to deal with this.
- "Imagine"?
It is indeed not that extreme, but sometimes it feels pretty close. It is hard to find entertainment that isn't tedious and predictable. The public seems to eat up rationalizations for bad behavior which are obvious nonsense.
I'm happy at work because I'm surrounded by people smarter, more motivated, and more conscientious than I am. Outside of work, well, some days I dream that Anderson's Brain Wave would come true, the Earth would move out of some magical interstellar intelligence-suppressing field, and everyone's IQ would quintuple overnight.
- This speculation is addressed in the novel Brainwave, by Poul Anderson (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain_Wave)
It's pretty dated regarding the roles of women and men, but the ideas are very interesting nevertheless. One of the big insights is that many people might not be ready to operate at full potential - they would succumb to various forms of insanity.
Look how the Internet's 'network effect' amplified the voices of conspiracy theorists all over the world. Now imagine an enhancement of that kind of paranoia: this is what the super-rationalist protagonists had to deal with in Brainwave...
