David Linden – Four Way Interview

David J. Linden is professor of neuroscience at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Maryland, USA. The author of more than ninety scientific papers and the acclaimed book The Accidental Mind, he also serves as editor-in-chief of the Journal of Neurophysiology. His latest book is Pleasure.

Why Science?

It was either that or crime and science seemed slightly less risky.

Why this book?

This book is about how the pleasure centers of the brain are activated by food, sex, meditation, exercise, drugs, gambling, paying taxes and goofing around on the Internet. It required a lot of fieldwork but I was prepared to make that sacrifice for my readers. Pleasure is the first book to explain the biology of reward in a way that will make you feel smarter and give you a laugh at the same time. Plus, it will provide you with clever anecdotes about topics from lesbian bonobo sex to the neuroscience of weight loss to hallucinogenic reindeer urine that will make you the toast of your social circle.

What’s next?

More fieldwork, I think.

What’s exciting you at the moment?

My lab has several new efforts that have me very enthused. These rely upon implanting cranial windows in the skulls of mice and then placing the mice under a special microscope (called a 2-photon confocal microscope) that allows us to see into the middle of otherwise opaque living brain tissue. This technique is allowing us to make time-lapse movies showing how neurons, glial cells and blood vessels in the brain respond to exercise and motor learning and how recovery of function proceeds following brain damage from amphetamine drugs.

Comments

It's On You - Nick Chater and George Loewenstein *****

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Introducing Artificial Intelligence – Henry Brighton & Howard Selina ****

It is almost impossible to rate these relentlessly hip books – they are pure marmite*. The huge Introducing … series (a vast range of books covering everything from Quantum Theory to Islam), previously known as … for Beginners , puts across the message in a style that owes as much to Terry Gilliam and pop art as it does to popular science. Pretty well every page features large graphics with speech bubbles that are supposed to emphasise the point. Funnily, Introducing Artificial Intelligence is both a good and bad example of the series. Let’s get the bad bits out of the way first. The illustrators of these books are very variable, and I didn’t particularly like the pictures here. They did add something – the illustrations in these books always have a lot of information content, rather than being window dressing – but they seemed more detached from the text and rather lacking in the oomph the best versions have. The other real problem is that...

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