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The “noosphere” (sometimes referred to as the neurosphere) can be described as “the sphere of human thought”. First used by geochemist Vladimir Verdansky, he believed that there were three stages in the development of the earth: the geosphere (inanimate matter), which was then transformed by the biosphere, (animate matter), which in turn would be transformed by the noosphere that arose from human cognition.

It’s interesting to note that Verdansky’s ideas helped contribute to a natural philosophy from the 19th and 20th Centuries called Russian Cosmism, which attempted to use empirical research combining elements of philosophy and religion to explore the origin and evolution of mankind and the universe, as well as to try and predict its future. Many of the ideas from this school helped contribute to transhumanism and is often seen as its natural precursor.

The term was also used by a French Jesuit Priest by the name of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin in 1925, where he described it as a sphere “above the animal biosphere, a human sphere, a sphere of reflection, of conscious invention, of conscious souls (the noosphere, if you will)”. This noosphere would, ultimately, become more complex and evolve through a process he called “noogenesis“, and would lead to the discovery that man “is nothing else than evolution become conscious of itself. The consciousness of each of us is evolution looking at itself and reflecting upon itself.”

For de Chardin, all this was leading to what he termed the “Omega“, the final stage in noogenesis, which was equivalent to a “final unity”:

“We are faced with a harmonized collectivity of consciousnesses to a sort of superconciousness. The earth not only becoming covered by myriads of grains of thought, but becoming enclosed in a single thinking envelope, a single unanimous reflection.”

In many ways, this concept is identical with the science fiction notion of a group mind or hivemind (as popularised by the Borg in Star Trek and, much closer to de Chardin’s time, Olaf Stapledon’s 1930 classic sci-fi novel Last and First Men), where there is a complete lack of individual identity. In fact, de Chardin did allude to this by saying that “the world’s Omega, as at its Alpha, lies the Impersonal”.

Rather interestingly, in recent years there has been some evidence to suggest that there is, indeed, a global subconscious mind that can be “tapped” into. The project, headed by a Dr. Roger Nelson, revolves around a small black box called a Random Event Generator that simply generates a random sequence of 0’s and 1’s, and it is believed to have been able to predict the death of Princess Diana, the Asian Tsunami, and also 9/11, by registering huge deviations in the otherwise normally flatline of random numbers.

But for Dr Nelson, talk of such psychic machines – with the potential to detect global catastrophes or terrorist outrages – is of far less importance than the implications of his work in terms of the human race.

For what his experiments appear to demonstrate is that while we may all operate as individuals, we also appear to share something far, far greater – a global consciousness. Some might call it the mind of God.

‘We’re taught to be individualistic monsters,’ he says. ‘We’re driven by society to separate ourselves from each other. That’s not right.

We may be connected together far more intimately than we realise.’

Much of the work and testing is carried out by the Global Consciousness Project. And the URL for their webpage? noosphere.princeton.edu.