It might be thought the height of poor taste to ascribe good fortune to a healthy man with a young family struck down at the age of sixty by an incurable degenerative disorder from which he must shortly die. But there is more than one sort of luck.
In 2008, historian Tony Judt learnt that he was suffering from a disease that would eventually trap his extraordinary mind in a declining and immobile body. At night, sleepless in his motionless state, he revisited the past in an effort to keep himself sane, and his dictated essays form a memoir unlike…
On top of the excellent wordsmithing, the concept and the execution of encoding poetry into a deathless bacterium in the hopes of having a human composition survive the death of our sun is one of the most interesting and exhilarating projects ever.
"Many artists seek to attain immortality through their art, but few would expect their work to outlast the human race and live on for billions of years. As Canadian poet Christian Boek has realized, it all comes down to the durability of your materials."-The Guardian
Internationally best-selling poet Christian Boek has spent more than ten years writing what promises to be the first example of "living poetry." After successfully demonstrating his concept in a colony of E. coli, Boek is on the verge of enciphering a beautiful, anomalous poem into the genome of an unkillable bacterium (Deinococcus radiodurans), which can,…
I've often been frustrated by people who dismiss Freud as pseudoscientific. Although it may be the case that he strayed outside of the boundaries of good science, Solms clarifies that Freud was well aware that he had reached the limits of what was possible. You'll read evidence from Freud's correspondence where he hopes for a future where brain imagine will help confirm or deny what he could only hypothesize.
That's a small part of the book, but an important one as Solms shares his search for a deeper understand of how and why the brain creates our experience of consciousness. It confirmed some of my understandings and challenged others.
And unlike other science books that share personal stories in order to help make the harder aspects more "approachable," Solms doesn't dumb things down. Rather, like Hofstadter in Gödel, Escher, Bach, you are taken on a wild ride through hard concepts. Even those I still don't understand, I have a new frame for thinking through what it is I don't understand...
'Solms and his colleagues are making a brilliant, determined, scrupulous and (one wants to say) tactful endeavour to approach, in a new way, the oldest question of them all' OLIVER SACKS
Once dismissed as unscientific, psychoanalytic therapy is proving to be among our most effective medical treatments of any kind - outperforming psychiatric drugs and rivalling vaccines in its power to prevent and heal. Why does it work so well?
Perhaps because one of the most controversial figures in psychology was right all along. Neuroscience now confirms much of what Sigmund Freud conjectured over a century ago: our deepest struggles…
