I have written about John Brockman before. He is the founder and manager of Edge.org, which, by the way, is totally different from Edge.com. Edge.org has earned the reputation of being the smartest web site there is. Since there are millions of web sites, probably in many of the languages of the world, it would be an enormous research job to verify which one is "smartest". Let's just agree that Brockman invites some truly excellent scientists, thinkers and writers to write for his site. Each year he has a theme and he selects some of the articles written on that year's theme for inclusion in a book. Some of his books don't appeal to me. His volume "What Should We Be Worried About?" doesn't attract me. I don't feel I need any help in better worrying.
However, his "Thinking: The New Science of Decision-Making, Problem-Solving, and Prediction in Life and Markets" is pretty cool, to say the least. Some of his collections seem to do a very good job of including many of the primary voices in a field and "Thinking" is one of them. I was reading in chapter 5 this morning. This chapter was written by the famous V.S. Ramachandran, the scientist who figured a way to help people who suffered from pain in a limb that had been amputated. The problem has been reported for more than 400 years. People who lost a limb still had pain in it! Turned out to be a brain and brain map of the body problem.
In his chapter, Ramachandran discusses a related problem, rare and perplexing. Otherwise normal people had a very strong urge to have an arm or leg amputated. The limb works fine but it doesn't feel right and never has. The condition, called apotemnophilia, is not well understood but someday may be. It too may well have more to do with the brain's map of the body and input and output from the body.
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Bill
Main blog: Fear, Fun and Filoz
Main web site: Kirbyvariety
