Steven Johnson, the guy who wrote the brilliant Emergence (a book whose lyrical description of emergent phenomena in ant-colonies inspired both my forthcoming novella Human Readable and the ants that crawl over Appeals Court, the sequel Charlie Stross and I wrote to Jury Service, which will be published as a fix-up novel by Argosy in just a couple weeks), has a new book out: Mind Wide Open: Your Brain And The Neuroscience Of Everyday Life, which he describes as:
…an attempt to look systematically at the question of what brain science can tell you about yourself as an individual. There are a number of great books that ask questions like: How did the brain evolve? Or: how does the brain work? This book asks a related, but more intimate question: how does your brain work? In what ways can science shed light on your own personality traits, emotional habits, mental blindspots or strengths? In the book I've set myself up as a kind of guinea pig for this experiment: I take a number of tests that evaluate different cognitive faculties; I do a number of explorations with neurofeedback; I help design a series of fMRI experiments on my own head. I also have conversations with some of the world's leading brain scientists, who function as guides through this amazing inner landscape.
