GROUP BRAIN

 Thinking needs a brain, so that if several people want to think together they need to build a brain for it. More precisely, they need some apparatus that can store and give access to cross-correlated information, a kind of active memory. In this respect, it is similar to the World Wide Web though on a very smaller scale. It does not have to be electronic and can be built from very simple physical components.  The basics consist of locations, a display screen, and linking operations.

Locations are where we can find information. In a computer, data has addresses and, in the simple physical form of this, these are actual locations in physical space. The information has to be there and we need to know where.

The display screen reflects back to us how the information is being organized. This is visual. It is why we have monitors with our PCs. It is increasingly the case that improving the quality and versatility of display is an important part of development of IT.

Linking operations connect what is on display with what is stored elsewhere. In simple physical form these can be reduced to labelling pieces of information so that we can identify them in different displays. In basic LVT, linking operations include members of the group physically moving data from one screen to another.

 

LVT can be modelled as a cube with three levels. Each of these levels corresponds to a screen or display surface.
  
The bottom one stores the basic data (or meanings) and usually has no order, because that is the main content of the middle level, where we have a screen/display of how the basic data is being organized or conceptualized.
  

The top level contains patterns or archetypal images of the unified view and goes beyond the visual to direct linking operations e.g. decisions

 

 

For this kind of construct to work as a brain a group needs to treat it like one.

First of all, everyone needs to feel that it is theirs.

Second, they have to focus on the information it processes, even if this is a very limited amount of information, and not dwell on what they have individually in their own brains.

Third, they need to grasp what is going on by itself adequately and what needs attention here and now.
As with any brain, there will be memories and anticipations, recollection and imagining, and the known and the unknown

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