John Horgan Libri

A day in the inner and outer lives of a college professor, blogger, divorced father, thinker, and yearner. What would it feel like to wake up inside the head of someone who writes about science for a living? John Horgan, acclaimed author of the bestseller The End of Science, answers that question in his genre-bending new book Pay Attention, a stream-of-consciousness account of a day in the life of his alter ego, Eamon Toole—a blogger, college professor, and divorced father. This work of fact-based fiction, or “faction,” follows Toole as he wakes up in his rented apartment in upstate New York, meditates with the mantra “Duh,” commutes via train and subway to an engineering school in New Jersey, teaches a William James essay on consciousness to freshmen, squabbles about Thomas Kuhn with colleagues over lunch, takes a ferry to Manhattan and spends the evening with his bossy, Tarot-reading girlfriend, Emily, on whom he plans to spring a big question. Throughout the day, Toole struggles to be rational while buffeted by fears and yearnings. Thoughts of sex and death keep intruding on his ruminations over quantum spookiness, the neural code, the Singularity and free will. Pay Attention is a profane, profound meditation on the entanglements of our inner and outer worlds and the elusiveness of truth.

Drawing on groundbreaking personal interviews as well as decades of research from psychologists and others, John Horgan traces the pathways that lead people into violent extremism and explores what happens to them as their involvement deepens.

This book takes readers to meet the presumed experts on how the brain works, but demonstrates that we cannot absolutely understand what is happening inside our heads, that science has achieved virtually nothing in explaining the mind and that science cannot define what makes us human.

Ein Streifzug durch die Wissenschaften, die sich auf verschiedenen Wegen den immer noch ungelösten Rätseln von Geist und Psyche des Menschen nähern: Von der Psychologie über die Neurologie, die Pharmakologie, die Evolutionsbiologie bis zur Genetik. John Horgan ist Wissenschaftsjournalist des „Scientific American“.

Die letzten Entdecker? Horgans kontrovers diskutiertes Buch porträtiert die führenden Wissenschaftler und Philosophen unserer Zeit - eine informative Einführung in die wichtigsten wissenschaftlichen Entwicklungen der letzten zwanzig Jahre wie in die Einsichten und Ansichten ihrer zentralen Vertreter. 'Wissenschaftsbuch des Jahres 1998'