Insight on insight

I'd like to draw your attention to an excellent article in the July 28 issue of The New Yorker written by Jonah Lehrer, author of Proust Was a Neuroscientist,on insight. He looks into the neuroscientific advances made in understanding what happens in the brain when we have an 'Aha' moment. This is one of my favorite subjects - the intersection of creativity and neuroscience. The article is compact, written in accessible language, and it's the first time I have seen this subject discussed where someone did not use the example of Friedrich August Kekule discovering the structure of the benzene ring by having a daydream of a snake biting its tale. It does not appear as though the article is available on line. So if you interested, you'll have to get it the old fashioned way - by buying a copy at the newsstand. Or perhaps you'll have an insight and come up with some creative way of solving that problem.


And Natalie Angier has a well-done article in today's Science Times about mirrors:

In a sense, mirrors are the best 'virtual reality' system that we can build...The object 'inside' the mirror is virtual, but as far as our eyes are concerned it exists as much as any other object.