Brockman on the edge

John Brockman

Today I used my free bus pass to go to Aberdeen and come back. A round trip of about 100 miles. But I was so absorbed in my Kindle that I was not existentially on the bus. The physical body was there but the notions of a self and of space and time were nowhere.

I was reading John Brockman’s 2011 book - This Will Make You Smarter - New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking. The book blurb covers the essence  – “What scientific concept would improve everybody’s cognitive toolkit? This is the question John Brockman, publisher of Edge.org, posed to (over 150 of) the world’s most influential thinkers. Their visionary answers flow from the frontiers of psychology, philosophy, economics, physics, sociology, and more. Surprising and enlightening, these insights will revolutionize the way you think about yourself and the world.”

Some of the contributions include:

• Daniel Kahneman on the “focusing illusion”
• Jonah Lehrer on controlling attention
• Richard Dawkins on experimentation
• Aubrey De Grey on conquering our fear of the unknown
• Martin Seligman on the ingredients of well-being
• Nicholas Carr on managing “cognitive load”
• Steven Pinker on win-win negotiating
• Daniel C. Dennett on benefiting from cycles
• Jaron Lanier on resisting delusion
• Frank Wilczek on the brain’s hidden layers
• Clay Shirky on the “80/20 rule”
• Daniel Goleman on understanding our connection to the natural world
• V. S. Ramachandran on paradigm shifts
• Matt Ridley on tapping collective intelligence
• John McWhorter on path dependence
• Lisa Randall on effective theorizing
• Brian Eno on “ecological vision”
• Richard Thaler on rooting out false concepts
• J. Craig Venter on the multiple possible origins of life
• Helen Fisher on temperament
• Sam Harris on the flow of thought
• Lawrence Krauss on living with uncertainty.

Edge.org  was launched in 1996 as the online version of "The Reality Club," an informal gathering of intellectuals that met in America from 1981-1996. Though the venue is now in cyberspace, the spirit of the Reality Club lives on in the lively back-and-forth discussions on the hot-button ideas driving the discussion today.

The web site makes a wealth of stimulating and cutting-edge material available for free. The vision is rooted in this quote - "To arrive at the edge of the world's knowledge, seek out the most complex and sophisticated minds, put them in a room together, and have them ask each other the questions they are asking themselves."

This morning I was physically on a Bluebird Bus but I was existentially cruising a collection of clever clogs with their cutting edge conundrums. Absent minded professors. Yoh!