Factoring Humanity

by Robert J. Sawyer

Well, nobody shares anything anymore. And without shared culture, civilization is doomed.”

Depending on the psychological predisposition of the individual, and on whether the left brain or the right brain was more affected by the electrical stimulation, the person wearing the helmet perceived either a benign or a malevolent presence—angels and gods on the left; demons and aliens on the right.

Remember Kekule, trying to work out the chemical structure of benzene? He dreamed of a snake-ring of atoms—which turned out to be exactly right.

Maybe the reason we sleep so much is that that’s when we interact most closely with the overmind. Maybe dreams occur while our daily individual experiences are being uploaded to the overmind.

we do acquire and use language with extraordinary ease, so much so that it must be innate. “But it can’t be genetically innate—as Lieberman points out, that would violate basic biology,