Keeping Time

Last night I went to a concert featuring tabla master Zakir Hussain. It was an amazing musical performance, his skill with the tabla is simply mind blowing. I don't think I've ever heard a drum that could have so many different tones and sounds. Nor have I heard a player who could play so fast, with rhythm, and complexity. Equally impressive is the improvisiational nature of the music, having to completely focus on the other instrument and play in a complimentary fashion. At that level, it really doesn't seem like the artist is 'thinking', but simply 'flowing' with the music. I wonder how people get into that 'flow' state, and what exactly it is. Is it a different brain process, or perhaps a very well tuned neural network? Would it be possible for a computer to get into a 'flow', maybe a parictular algorithim or hardware design?

Is the Internet Conscious?

I've been reading on some Aritificial Intelligence stuff lately, and was thinking about how the brain is a series of neurons, each firing in response to stimuli. Each individual neuron doesn't really have an idea of what the other neurons are, or what they are doing. Then I began to wonder if the Internet works in the same way. All the users are the millions of neurons, and work independently. But when taken together as whole, is the Internet like a big brain? And if so, is it conscious?