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. This is the same Dr. Daniel G. Amen featured on Quackwatch (his response) and whose claim to help "prevent" Alzheimer's was severely critiqued on Salon recently (once again, Amen responds). Whatever else is true (Amen......

BOOKS: Marjane Satrapi--she grew up in Iran so you don't have to--is speaking at the Moore tonight. Best known for her graphic memoir Persepolis (Now a major motion picture!), Satrapi is also the author and illustrator of Embroideries and Chicken with Plums, along with several children's books. 7:30 p.m. // Moore Theatre, 1932 Second Avenue // Tickets: $25-$32 SCIENCE: Buddhist-friendly pediatric psychiatrist Daniel Siegel, co-director of the UCLA Mindful Awareness Center, has written a......

MUSIC: The 2008 Pop Conference at EMP kicks off today (and runs through the 13th). There's more than 160 presenters across some forty panels. Tonight there's a keynote panel (inspired by the current EMP|SFM exhibition American Sabor: Latinos in U.S. Popular Music) with Louie Perez of Los Lobos and Raul Pacheco of Ozomatli. Later on in the conference, a performance by Blue Scholars, a talk about being a "ghostwriter" by the king of the......

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). As we understand it, these kinds of tests look for delays in "implicit cognition," deep-rooted neurological associations you aren't usually aware of -- it's just the way the world......

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......