More Brains

Also recorded anniversary edition of Stephen J. Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man, Tantor. Pinker and Gould crossed paths and swords. Gould, who died too soon, was also a major public scientist. Gould goes after racial stereotyping here by looking at argument that people of color lack brainpower. He tells great stories. (Imagine using buckshot to fill up the skulls of artists and intellectuals to find out who had biggest brain. (Tipoff: Turgenev wins, Walt Whitman loses.) Gould shows the persistence of idiocy and thuggery. 

Collaboration

“Neuroplasticity” is discussed in two recent books, Jeffrey Schwartz’s The Mind and the Brain, Tantor and Richard J. Davidson’s The Emotional Life of your Brain. Brilliance. The two books come from different directions helping define the nature of thought, the ways of the brain. Both have Buddhist edge. Davidson's research is really impressive. Both had the same collaborator, Sharon Begley, a science writer/editor for the Wall Street Journal and Newsweek with a book of her own on neuroplasticity. Paul Zak's The Moral Molecule (Brilliance) is also connecting biochemistry with behavior.