An evening with Mike Jay - Gower Street

Join us for an evening with Mike Jay discussing his new book Wireheads.

As humanity and technology become ever more tightly interwoven, Wireheads explores the final and most intimate frontier: the brain, and the electronic devices, magnetic signals, implants, and computer interfaces that promise to merge it with the world of the machine. Will these technologies eventually direct our thoughts and behaviour—or are they doing so already? Will they maintain us in states of artificial bliss, or connect us to higher intelligences, or replace the world of our senses with simulated realities?

Mike Jay, acclaimed author of Psychonauts, now traces the tangled, paranoid history of these real and fantastical brain technologies. From the fictions of H. G. Wells and Philip K. Dick to The Matrix, the CIA’s Cold War experiments and Elon Musk’s Neuralink, scientists and visionaries have long chased the dream of neural enhancement and control, with wildly varying degrees of success.

Encompassing covert military operations and psychedelic art, moral philosophy and cybernetic theory, Jay has assembled a thrilling narrative out of our attempts to understand and rewire the brain—and a brilliant meditation on what it means to be human in a posthuman age.

Mike Jay is a celebrated historian of science, medicine, and culture. He is the author of acclaimed books including Free Radicals, Mescaline, and Psychonauts, described by Michael Pollan as “easily the most interesting work of psychedelic history I’ve read in years.”

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Host or Publisher Waterstones