On the Shelf
The Secret of Secrets and techniques
By Dan BrownDoubleday: 688 pages, $38
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Writing is difficult. Writing books is more durable. In order a mere plebeian creator interviewing Dan Brown for the primary time, I wanted to know: After you’ve bought 200 million books, does it get any simpler?
“It’s the same process. It’s identical,” Brown says on a video name from his dwelling library in New Hampshire. “Your characters don’t care how many books you’ve sold; you’re still facing the blank page. What becomes more challenging is you put an enormous amount of pressure on yourself and say, ‘Listen, there’s a certain number of people who trust me.’ If you can get somebody to spend 10 hours with your words, you better deliver.”
It’s secure to say that Brown has repeatedly delivered. A grasp of the brainy, twisty thriller, Brown’s 2003 novel, “The Da Vinci Code,” is likely one of the bestselling books of all time, with 85 million copies moved, and was tailored right into a field workplace hit starring Tom Hanks. His novels transfer with kinetic power, his plots are intricate puzzles shrouded in non secular iconography, historic cryptography and different obscure arcana. Studying a Brown novel is each a thrill trip and an immersion in real-world details.
“Dan Brown has figured out the nexus point of intrigue and suspense and how to capture the reader and never let them go until the story he is telling ends,” stated Newman, the creator of bestsellers “Falling,” “Drowning” and “Worst Case Scenario.” “It’s really hard to do that well. And he makes it seem effortless. His instincts about what makes a great thriller are almost unparalleled and you can’t put his books down.”
Brown’s new novel, “The Secret of Secrets,” is maybe his most formidable enterprise but: a dense thriller that can also be a meditation on the character, and the attainable future, of human consciousness. The novel kicks off with the theft of a guide manuscript from a publishing home — a guide, we study, which will include the secrets and techniques to a completely new approach of trying on the world. The guide’s creator, Katherine Solomon, is a number one researcher in noetics — the science of parapsychology — and the crux of her thesis is explosive and radical, centering across the idea of nonlocal consciousness, or the notion that our brains are usually not autonomous machines however quite receptors that purchase consciousness externally.
“It’s no secret that I like to write about big themes,” says Brown. “And there’s no bigger theme than human consciousness. It’s the lens through which we experience reality. I wanted to write about it for a long time and I just hadn’t seen a way in. How do I make something ethereal into a thriller?”
Dan Brown’s new novel, “The Secret of Secrets,” is a thriller that can also be a meditation on the character, and the attainable future, of human consciousness.
(Cheryl Senter/ For The Instances)
He has achieved it in typical Brownian vogue: by exploiting consciousness into a possible software for world domination. For eight years, Brown went deep, education himself in cutting-edge mind science and speaking to specialists within the subject. “I needed to find that pivot point that made it relevant to everyone,” he says. “And I discovered that we have a model of consciousness that’s outdated in the same way the geocentric model of the universe was outdated. This research will change the way we view our world.”
To be able to grasp Brown’s story, a fast mind science tutorial is important. Regular human consciousness is tied to inhibitory neurotransmitters within the central nervous system referred to as gamma-aminobutyric acid, or GABA. Neuroscientists have now found that when GABA ranges drop precipitously, our notion of the world can change. That notion isn’t essentially subjective however is, in truth, a window into one other actuality that exists past our personal. Epilepsy sufferers, who expertise harmful reductions in GABA throughout seizures, have been recognized to expertise euphoric states during which they obtain a sudden flash of what seems to be a actuality with which they’ve in any other case been unfamiliar.
That is much like anecdotal accounts of people who’ve near-death experiences, when the GABA ranges drop off totally, and a brand new perceptual gateway seems to swing open earlier than them. For years, scientists dismissed these accounts as fantasy, however at the moment are starting to suppose in any other case, that the notion of an out-of-body expertise, during which our consciousness delinks from our brains and acts as a receiver of one other, common consciousness, isn’t simply science fiction. Chris Roe and Michael Daw, two main noetics researchers, revealed a broadly mentioned research final yr proposing this very factor. Of their paper “Theories of Non-Local Consciousness: A Review and Framework for Building Rigour,” they provide that “consciousness extends beyond the body and the brain and need not be constrained by our usual notions of time and space.”
It’s this type of analysis that gave Dan Brown his entry level. “I started in a very skeptical place,” he says. “If you asked me eight years ago, ‘Do you believe in out-of-body experiences,’ I’d attribute it to drug hallucinations. Life after death? No way. But my thinking evolved as I burrowed deeper into the science. I know now there is precedent that proves we can have a consciousness outside the body.”
For Katherine, this revelation is the important thing that can unlock international comity. “Imagine a future in which humans start to lower their brain filters and begin to exist with greater understanding of reality,” she tells her cohort Robert Langdon, the cryptology professor hero of “The Da Vinci Code.” “We might truly start to believe that we’re a unified species.”
However given this can be a Dan Brown novel, there may be highly effective opposition to this concept, and a powerful want to weaponize nonlocal consciousness, particularly throughout the corridors of a sure intelligence company in Washington. This, in line with Brown, can also be the stuff of nonfiction. “I have no doubt that the government is involved in this kind of research,” says Brown. “It makes no sense that we wouldn’t. And the Russians are spending a ton of money on it, as are the Chinese.”
“Obviously, there are incredibly difficult moral questions at the root of everything that is being explored in this field,” Dan Brown says of neuroscience. “But I think that, as this new model of consciousness emerges, a lot more good will come of it than evil.”
(Cheryl Senter/ For The Instances)
Solomon and Langdon’s seek for the guide lands them in Prague, a metropolis with an extended historical past of mystical exploration that stretches again to the fifteenth century. “As soon as I knew I was going to write about consciousness, I knew the book would be set in Prague,” says Brown. “In the days when Emperor Rudolf II ruled, he invited alchemists and Kabbalists to visit Prague and explore the idea of the Great Beyond. The city has long been the locus of this kind of metaphysical thought.” The guide additionally incorporates a golem, which in Czech mythology is a creature usual from mud and clay who serves as an ethical guardian — a metaphor that Brown makes use of as “an inanimate creature into which one can infuse life and consciousness.”
Brown is a dogged researcher who grounds his each imaginative fancy in truth. He toured Prague’s well-known monuments a number of occasions, together with an enormous bomb shelter beneath Folimanka Park that options in his novel, writing in his pocket book alongside the best way. “I try to write down descriptions, rather than take photos, because you may forget certain sounds, such as the way the elevator in Petřín Tower scrapes every few feet during its ascent, or its funky smell,” he says.
As a result of Brown’s novel is a conflict between benevolent actors and people who are bent on exploiting Solomon’s concepts, it’s not onerous to attract a parallel to synthetic intelligence, a topic that Brown explored in his prior novel, 2017’s “Origin.” Brown is sanguine about AI’s potential; he’s not inclined to affix the dystopian camp that regards it as an existential risk.
“Humans have never created a technology that has not been weaponized,” he says. “The wheel, fire, the computer. We’ve used them all to kill each other or gain advantage in some way. AI is just another tool and it will be used primarily for good. We’re living in this time when our technological growth is exponential but our philosophical maturity is linear. Computers can fly drones that carry bombs, but 99% of the computers’ usage is affirmative. And I think AI will be the same way.”
For Brown, that optimism extends to the improvements in neuroscience that he explores in “The Secret of Secrets.” “Obviously, there are incredibly difficult moral questions at the root of everything that is being explored in this field,” he says. “But I think that, as this new model of consciousness emerges, a lot more good will come of it than evil.”
Dan Brown at his dwelling in Rye Seashore, N.H.
(Cheryl Senter/ For The Instances)
