Howard Bloom

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Howard Bloom (born 1943) is the author of three books, The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History; Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century; and How I Accidentally Started the Sixties. He was a publicist in the music and film industries from 1974 to 1988, working with figures like Prince, Michael Jackson, Bob Marley, Bette Midler, and John Cougar Mellencamp. He is the founder of two new scientific fields, mass behavior and paleopsychology. Bloom is currently working to establish a third new field, omnology.[1] He is also the founder of two international, multi-disciplinary scientific groups. The first, focused on evolutionary psychology, was The Group Selection Squad (1995). The second is the International Paleopsychology Project[2] (1997).

Contents

[edit] Biography

[edit] Early life

Howard Bloom was born in 1943 in Buffalo, New York. At the age of ten, he became involved in science.

Bloom entered Reed College in 1961, but dropped out and embarked on a series of adventures chronicled in his unpublished book How I Accidentally Started The Sixties. In 1963, he returned to scientific work, doing research on B.F. Skinner's programmed learning at Rutgers Graduate School of Education under Dr. Merrill Harmon. Bloom eventually returned to school at New York University, graduating magna cum laude and phi beta kappa in 1968.

Bloom has been mentored since 1988 by one of his key teachers, Dr. E.E. Coons, of NYU's Graduate Psychology Department. Dr. Coons discovered the basic functions of the hypothalamus, and is the keeper of the legacy of Neal E. Miller, one of psychology's most important 20th century researchers, and one of those whose work had made an indelible impression on Bloom when he was sixteen. [3]

[edit] Early career

Bloom edited grant proposals and conference proceedings for Sol Gordon, head of the Middlesex County Mental Health Clinic and author of books like How Can You Tell If You're Really in Love? and All Families Are Different (1963). A year later, he edited and wrote for the Boy Scouts of America during a summer vacation. He updated the Boy Scout Handbook chapter on masturbation and field manuals on stalking, tracking, and camouflage. In 1966 he wrote Ten Steps to Organize a Boy Scout Troop, the manual on how to build new Boy Scout troops. Since he had previously been kicked out of the Boy Scouts for incompetence at Morse Code, the experience convinced him that if you do enough research and you care enough about your reader, you can write on any subject. After that, Bloom edited and art-directed an experimental graphics and literary magazine that won two National Academy of Poets prizes (1967-1968).

In 1968, Bloom turned down four graduate school fellowships in clinical psychology to embark on a scientific expedition into what he called "the heart of society's myth-making machine, the aorta of human mass behavior, and the closest vantage point I could find to the forces of history"-- business and mass media. In 1968, he co-founded Cloud Studio[4], and in 1970, was featured on the cover of Art Direction Magazine for his role in establishing what became one of the leading avant-garde commercial art studios on the East Coast.[5] In 1971, he became the editor of Circus Magazine. He helped increase the magazine's circulation by 211%, and was credited by veteran Rolling Stone editor Chet Flippo with "creating a new magazine genre: the heavy metal magazine".

From 1973 to 1976, Bloom helped start public and artist relations departments for Gulf & Western's fourteen record companies and ABC Records. In 1976, Bloom founded The Howard Bloom Organization, Ltd.,[6] the largest public relations firm in the record industry. His clients included several of music's biggest names of the era.[7] Bloom’s firm publicized Amnesty International’s first effort to gain visibility in the US, handled the launch of Farm Aid, and worked on major films from Paramount Pictures, Warner Brothers, and New Line Cinema. He was also involved with the three films that established a new identity for Disney, Down and Out in Beverly Hills, Ruthless People, and Outrageous Fortune. Working closely with Prince's manager, and current Chairman of the Buena Vista Music Group, Bob Cavallo,[8] Bloom played a role in saving a Prince film Warner Brothers was about to trash, Purple Rain. Bloom was also consulted on a regular basis during the formative days of a venture that became MTV. He also devised and ran three programs for the black community, an Earth, Wind, & Fire campaign to raise the visibility of The National Black United Fund[9], Lionel Richie's SuperStudent Program (sponsored by Pepsi Cola), and Kool and the Gang's 'It's Kool to Stay In School' campaign (sponsored by Coca Cola).

With Spin Magazine founder Bob Guccione, Jr. and rock manager David Krebs, Bloom co-founded the national anti-censorship group Music In Action. Bloom was the organization's day-to-day work horse, battling a campaign by Tipper Gore, Susan Baker, and other wives of high-placed government officials, who had founded the Parents Music Resource Center. From 1984 to 1991, Bloom appeared on television and radio, combating what he felt was the "propaganda" of born again extremists. In addition, Bloom assigned one of the account executives of The Howard Bloom Organization, Rhonda Markowitz, to defend political rock singer Jello Biafra from the Parents Music Resource Center's attacks.

[edit] Current endeavors

Bloom is a faculty member of The Graduate Institute's Conscious Evolution and Organizational Leadership programs, a recent visiting scholar in the Graduate Psychology Department at NYU [verification needed], and founder of the Big Bang Tango Media Lab.[10] He also founded the Group Selection Squad, a team of forty scientists who championed group selection and multi-level selection over commonly accepted Neo-Darwinian theories. His campaign was supported by David Sloan Wilson, an important evolutionary scientist, and one of the first to introduce the term "multi-level selection".

In theoretical physics, Bloom is the co-author and supporter of the hidden-time approach to quantum theory. This approach was developed by Pavel Kurakin and George Malinetsky, of the Keldysh Institute of Applied Mathematics at the Russian Academy of Sciences. Bloom is a founding board member of both the Epic of Evolution Society and The Darwin Project, and is a member of the New York Academy of Sciences, the National Association for the Advancement of Science, the Association for Psychological Science[11], the Human Behavior and Evolution Society, The International Society of Human Ethology, the Academy of Political Science, and the NASA-founded Aerospace Technologies Working Group. He is also an advisory board member of the Institute for Accelerating Change.

Bloom was interviewed on the syndicated radio program Coast to Coast Live on November 4, 2006; this article was cited by the show's host, Ian Punnett, during the interview.

[edit] Writings

Bloom has written three books, The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History, Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century, and the still-unpublished How I Accidentally Started the Sixties. Two international conferences have been convened based in whole or in part on the unfinished draft of his next book, Reinventing Capitalism: Putting Soul In the Machine - A Radical Reperception of Western Civilization. Those conferences have been in New York (December 2005) and Amsterdam (March 2006), and have attracted attendees from as far afield as Germany and Australia. As of 2005, Bloom had two papers in physics publications: "The Xerox Effect: On the Importance of Pre-Biotic Evolution"[12] and "Conversation (dialog) Model of Quantum Transitions"[13] at arXiv.org. Bloom's articles have also appeared in the periodicals The Washington Post, Wired, The Village Voice, Cosmopolitan, Omni, The Independent Scholar, Across Species Comparisons and Psychopathology, New Ideas in Psychology, and in two book series, Research in Biopolitics and the Disinformation Company's trilogy You Are Being Lied To, Everything You Know is Wrong, and Abuse Your Illusions.

[edit] Recognition

Bloom has been featured in every issue of Who's Who in Science and Engineering since the publication's inception in 1991.[verification needed] He's also won several awards from Performance Magazine, and in 2005, was awarded the Global Entertainment and Media Summit's only Award for Lifetime Achievement and Commitment to Career Excellence.[1]

[edit] Criticism

Bloom has been accused of racism against Arabs and other people of Middle-Eastern descent because of his book The Lucifer Principle.[14] However, supporters point out that this criticism misquotes Bloom in several respects. He criticizes "certain Islamic societies", not all. He footnotes his quotes from the Koran, and says Islam does have its positive sides. He also says "Christians by the millions would take upon themselves the privilege of killing, torturing and raping those who weren't members of their triumphant creed."[15]

[edit] References

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ Omnology and Howard's Big Boom Tango. Retrieved on 2006-05-06.
  2. ^ The International Paleopsychology Project. Retrieved on 2006-05-06.
  3. ^ Biography of Dr. Coons. Retrieved on 2006-06-23.
  4. ^ CloudEyes: Howard Bloom. Retrieved on 2006-05-06.
  5. ^ CloudEyes.com. Retrieved on 2006-05-06.
  6. ^ Disinformation: Howard Bloom. Retrieved on 2006-05-06.
  7. ^ Howard Bloom to Receive GEMS Lifetime Achievement Award. Retrieved on 2006-05-06.
  8. ^ The Walt Disney Corporate Bios: Bob Cavallo. Retrieved on 2006-05-06.
  9. ^ The National Black United Fund. Retrieved on 2006-05-06.
  10. ^ Big Bang Tango Media Lab. Retrieved on 2006-05-06.
  11. ^ The Association for the Psychological Science. Retrieved on 2006-05-06.
  12. ^ Howard Bloom. "The Xerox Effect: On The Importance of Pre-Biotic Evolution". Retrieved on 2006-05-06.
  13. ^ Howard Bloom. "Conversation (dialog) Model of Quantum Transitions". Retrieved on 2006-05-06.
  14. ^ The Lucifer Principle, by Howard Bloom, Calls Muslims "Barbarians"!. Retrieved on 2006-05-06.
  15. ^ Howard Bloom. The Lucifer Principle, 176. 

[edit] External links

  • HowardBloom.net - 'Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind' (Howard Bloom's homepage)
  • HowardBloom.net - 'Instant Evolution. The Influence of the City on Human Genes: A Speculative Case', Howard Bloom, New Ideas in Psychology, vol 19, no 3, December 2001, p 203-220 (first presented May 11, 2000)
  • BigBangTango.net - 'Big Bang Tango Media Lab'
  • EntelechyJournal.com - 'The Roots of Omnology: an academic base for the promiscuously curious, a discipline that concentrates on seeing the patterns that emerge when one views all the sciences and the arts at once', Howard Bloom
  • PhysicaPlus.org - 'Xerox Effect: On the Importance of Pre-biotic Evolution', Howard Bloom, PhysicaPlus (October 1, 2004)
  • [2] “Conversation (dialog) model of quantum transitions”. George Malinetsky, Pavel Kurakin, and Howard Bloom.
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