A Momentary Taste of Being

In his third book length publication Jonah Lehrer takes on the world of creativity, innovation, and to some extent imagination--though that is hardly touched upon at all.  Leaving the secure ground of neuroscience (particularly in the second half og the book) Lehrer strays into the fields of social psychology and sociology with somewhat mixed results. Perhaps that is only for me.  I tend to become quite skeptical when research involves more than empirically verifiable fact and strays off into the territory of group interaction.  You can say that something worked, but it seems difficult to pinpoint why that something worked in the particular instance.  Taking the well-known example of Pixar, Lehrer  (summarizing the work of others, implies that success was largely the result of architecture forcing hallway meetings and interchange.  This, in turn, blossomed into some of the wonderful films we see from the studio.  If such chance meetings and random co...

Neurobabble and Real Science of the Mind via Maverick Philosopher I love neuroscience.  Or more particularly, I love some of the strange things that can be encountered in the science of the mind--synaesthesia is most particularly interesting to me.  But I've often found myself frustrated with neuroscience for reasons I couldn't quite pinpoint.  It often seemed as though explanations were offered that explained nothing.  Or that explanations went off in search of a problem.  There was something distinctly unsatisfying with my encounters.  This article goes a long way toward explaining it and offering a glimpse of what the author calls a real science of the mind.  As to that, I cannot say because the fields he talks about are news to me--but they look like they may be fruitful areas in which to read in the future.

Neuroscience and Free Will Unreasonably characterized in this article as a "rant."   I hardly think the approach this professor took would qualify in any way as a rant.  It is a measured, reasoned, rational response that he should not have had to made.  To be fair, the article headline is the only place the word appears, and the article seems fair enough.

Yawning your way to empathy Not likely to win friends and influence people. (via Books Inq.)

Strangers in a strange land--ships passing in the night --you name the new metaphors of neuroscience and why they may be wrong.

Jonah Lehrer tells us why the Pundits can't predict A soupçon. How did the experts do? When it came to predicting the likelihood of an outcome, the vast majority performed worse than random chance. In other words, they would have done better picking their answers blindly out of a hat. Liberals, moderates and conservatives were all equally ineffective. Although 96% of the subjects had post-graduate training, Mr. Tetlock found, the fancy degrees were mostly useless when it came to forecasting.

An interview, and overview, and an excerpt of his new book.

One of the few pleasures of traveling away from family is the fact that much reading can be done.  So on the plane flights to and from Chicago, I completed two books.  The first I've already reported on.  The second is for discussion here. Jonah Lehrer is the keeper of The Frontal Cortex blog and the author of one of my all-time favorite nonfiction books Proust Was a Neuroscientist .  This book has joined the ranks of that and both Sway and Click , as an enjoyable, fascinating, and enlightening read.  The title says it all--the book is about how different parts of the brain contribute to decision making and how we must allow them to do so.  It enters into the question of how to make extremely complex decisions and how to make simple ones--and it turns out that the means of making those decisions might be counter-intuitive.  Equally counter-intuitive to divided Western Man is Mr. Lehrer's reference to the emotions and emotional center as the brai...

One of my chief conflicts with Catholicism (despite the fact the I am and remain a Catholic) and with many people in it is not, contrary to what many would have you believe, anti-intellectualism, but a stringent, austere, and deadening anti-emotionalism.  If you should bring an emotional datum into an argument, no matter how pertinent the response is nearly always, "Reason must triumph."  It is refreshing to reflect on the passages below to realize that the triumph of reason is, in fact, the triumph of the emotional life.  The two strands cannot so easily be parted.  The human entity is not intellect and/or emotion but intellect entwined in emotion.  To deny the emotional life is to deny the intellectual life, as these passages demonstrate. How We Decide Jonah Lehrer The simple idea connecting Plato’s philosophy to cognitive psychology is the privileging of reason over emotion. It’s easy to understand why this vision has endured for so long. It raises Homo ...

I very much enjoyed Jonah Lehrer's book Proust Was a Neuroscientist , so when I saw How We Decide in the Library, I thought it was a lead-in and picked it up.  Much to my surprise and pleasure it is a more recent books, so I don't have a long list of back-reading in the Lehrer Canon.  The introduction of this book is promising. From How We Decide Jonah Lehrer But this doesn’t mean that our brains come preprogrammed for good decision-making. Despite the claims of many self-help books, intuition isn’t a miraculous cure-all. Sometimes feelings can lead us astray and cause us to make all sorts of predictable mistakes. The human brain has a big cortex for a reason. The simple truth of the matter is that making good decisions requires us to use both sides of the mind. For too long, we’ve treated human nature as an either/or situation. We are either rational or irrational. We either rely on statistics or trust our gut instincts. There’s Apollonian logic versus Dionysian feeling;...