Jonah Lehrer

Just because an idea is true doesn't mean it can be proved. And just because an idea can be proved doesn't mean it's true.

— Jonah Lehrer

The story of the brain's separation from the body begin with Rene Descartes. The most influential philosopher of the seventeenth century, Descartes divided being into two distinct substances: a holy soul and a mortal carcass. The soul was the source of reason, science, and everything nice. Our flesh, on the other hand, was "clock-like," just a machine that bleeds. With this schism, Descartes condemned the body to a life of subservience, a power plant for the brain's light bulbs.

— Jonah Lehrer

Neuroscience has contributed so much in just a few decades to how we think about human nature and how we know ourselves.

— Jonah Lehrer

As much as I loved the ideas, I excelled at experimental failure, I found new ways to make experiments not work. I would mess up PCRs, add the wrong buffers, northerns, westerns, southerns. I would make them not work in quite ingenious ways, and I realized slowly, over the course of those years, that the secret to being a great scientist is to love the manual labor of it.

— Jonah Lehrer