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Hardly any other human activity is so preferentially interpreted as an elitist process as mental activity.

Because outstanding mental achievements by individuals occur rarely enough, they are often overestimated, in such a way that the preceding division of labour is no longer perceived at all. In fact, however, it is precisely this division of labour that provides the necessary foundation for elite achievements [243] p.114:


Even such a pronounced individual thinker as Isaac Newton was aware of this [244] :


But if several people think about a certain problem at the same time or one after the other in a division of labour, then their brains, I maintain, temporarily form a common brain of brains.


Here I use the Greek prefix   μετα   in the sense of "super-" (as in metagalaxis, metacritic or meta-language) or in reference to the biological term "metazoon" for the multicellular living being that followed the unicellular protozoon in developmental history.

So if you think that the term metabrain means some kind of news about meta- or parapsychology or even metaphysics, I am sorry to disappoint you. This is merely a rational description of how the mental division of labour works.

Even a single person can form a metabrain with himself by using his own records from earlier times as an aid to memory, thus exceeding the capacity of the normal single brain.

A metabrain thus presupposes a mental division of labour in which at least one living person participates. This also applies if the mental work is shared with machines (but not: by machines alone).

Obviously, collective thinking based on the division of labour has developed enormously over the last three hundred years, while the individual brains of the people involved still have the same biological structure as before.


Examples of group intelligence (of metabrains) can be found wherever people work together or one after the other on a particular task, be it building a skyscraper or making an aeroplane.

In both the one and the other case, even the most ingenious chief designer can at best only mentally grasp a few details in addition to the overall objective within the given processing period.
The majority of the information about the thousands of details is assigned to the numerous staff members, from the design of the detailed drawings to the knowledge about the expert hand movements for assembling a wide variety of components.

When someone is operated on in hospital, the person in question is usually filled with pride when the chief surgeon operates on them personally.
In reality, however, there is a metabrain at work in every operation, ranging from the head doctor to the youngest nurse involved. Even if the chief physician is the main determinant of success - he alone would not be able to perform the operation. Not only because he does not have enough hands. 

Of course, an intellectual division of labour also takes place when knowledge is used that is only available in written form, regardless of whether the authors of the writing used are still alive or not. In this sense, Einstein also temporarily formed a metabrain with Newton, or Marx with Ricardo.

When an engineer designs a component on a computer screen with the help of a modern CAD system (hardware and software for computer-aided design), he also forms a metabrain with the CAD system. Neither the engineer alone nor the computer on its own would be able to design the component in the given time limit, draw it cleanly and save it so elegantly accessible and precise for later changes.

However, a group of interconnected computers does not form an independent metabrain. Even a network of machines remains only occupied matter. To form a metabrain out of it, at least one more human being is required.

Finally, general school education also aims, among other things, to enable pupils to participate in metabrains in the future. Learning to read, write and calculate serves this purpose, as does the promotion of sociable behaviour.

In any case, the surpassing of the capacity of individual human brains as a result of the "simple" division of labour, which has been practised for millennia, is taking on an unprecedented upswing through modern computer science.

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6.2   The Splendour and Misery of the Intellectual Division of Labour

Metabrains have long since assumed dramatic proportions compared to individual brains. The confident mastery of a technology that combines millions of transistors on a single processor chip measuring only a few square millimetres into a functional product bears impressive witness to this.

But also space travel or the generation of electrical energy in nuclear power plants, genetic engineering or the dynamic optimisation of huge economic units is only possible in each case through the targeted cooperation of thousands upon thousands of people over years and decades.

Examples of the splendour of the intellectual division of labour can therefore be found effortlessly.


First of all, the examples just mentioned represent precisely the large-scale projects where the most impressive accidents occur.

The problems, however, already begin with the mental division of labour of a single person with himself. This applies in particular to undesirable memory lapses, which occasionally occur.

On the other hand, a healthy neuro-psychological protective function of our brains is realised in a positive sense: What is forgotten cannot have been that important.

We would all perish from data overload anyway if our short-term memories were not constructed as sieves.

However, the "infirmity" of our forgetfulness contributes decisively to the brilliance of the division of labour.

It is only through this that we are forced to separate the essential from the unessential and thus take the decisive step from "eclectic" thinking (the collection of every bit without evaluation) to creative thinking.


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6.4   The Limits of the Metabrains

The many people who have so far tried to prove Fermat's conjecture have at times had one thing in common: they have thought about the same problem and in doing so have formed a special metabrain that is grouped around a specific thinking goal.

But there are also metabrains without goals. These include conversations about trivial topics; that is, when several people talk to each other, exchanging opinions and feelings.

Metabrains with thinking goals, on the other hand, can be extremely long-lived structures that even last for millennia, for example when writing is used as a storage medium.

It does not matter whether the thinking goal is achievable or not and whether it is based on correct or incorrect assumptions. The common goal of thought only has to fulfil one condition:


Participation in a metabrain is always temporary from the individual's point of view. As long as a particular person is thinking about a concrete subject, she forms a part of the corresponding metabrain with her brain. If she stops thinking about it, this state ends immediately. If she thinks about the topic again at some point, she is again a participant in this metabrain.

This is also true for  you  at this moment: You are now, as you read these lines, forming a metabrain with me on the subject of "metabrain" within a larger theme on the flood of data. Whenever you reflect on this in your further life, you will again be a participant in this special metabrain.


Metabrains are highly flexible. If they are formed as goal-oriented systems, they often dissolve again after reaching the goal, only to emerge again in a different composition.


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