Results tagged “neuroscience”

Wednesday science writer Winifred Gallagher is in town to discuss Rapt at 7:30 p.m. at the Elliott Bay Book Co., 101 S. Main St. in Seattle (free). She also pops up Thursday at the "Good Life" event at 6:30 p.m. at the Palace Ballroom, 2100 Fifth Avenue (tickets: $25).

...is not even a remotely true headline, but we can't resist a pop cultural allusion. However, if you rearrange the words a bit, suddenly the truth snaps into focus, like a section of sagittal tissue on a microscope slide: the Wired story is about the brain-mapping going on at Paul Allen's Brain Institute. Science writer Jonah Lehrer takes you on a tour of the facility, explaining the "brain atlas" concept that maps what we know about the brain, from "gene expression to a cellular level." Also, there are robots, working day and night on mouse brains. It's pretty ingenious, but for all our sakes, we hope they never get loose.

Jonah Lehrer is all laconic, low-key business behind the podium, despite his emo-rocker look on his homepage. A little more bedhead and some ink, and he could make a third bandmate for We Are Scientists. (Tambourine?) He was Town Hall last night talking about his second book, How We Decide, which, it turns out, has a lot to do with dopamine-driven emotions, rather than Vulcan-style rationality.

Last night we flipped on the tee-vee, and stumbled on a KCTS fundraiser: Dr. Daniel G. Amen in his self-produced show, "Change Your Brain, Change Your Life." If you missed it, you're in luck: it's showing fifteen more times locally.

As a brain-dead "undecided," we were naturally curious when we heard the Implicit Association Test people had set up a Presidential Candidates Test. It takes about 10 minutes, and purports to measure your neurological affinity for Clinton, Obama, Huckabee, and McCain (or little pictures of them).

The soul-crushingly young Jonah Lehrer was at Town Hall last night, his mere presence deriding our wasted time on the planet. At 25, he's been a line cook, a lab tech, and a Rhodes Scholar, and he's now an author (Proust Was a Neuroscientist), editor-at-large for SEED, and of course a blogger. (We were a pantry chef one night, and we learned how to "make" a crème brûlée with a propane blowtorch, but so far no Rhodes Scholarship, no book deal.) By contrast, Lou Dobbs was upstairs, giving inspiration for late-in-life windbags/rabble-rousers, so perhaps it evened out.