Publications

Romanticism and the Divided Brain

How human history is shaped by neural anatomy “Two souls, alas, dwell in my breast, each seeks to rule without the other. – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust At the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th century,…

Alchemy and the Problems of Modern Science

How our biases and expectations keep shaping our results The 16th century was a turbulent time for Europe. With Luther’s reformation and Henry’s separation of the English from the Catholic Church (the original Brexit, if you will), the hold Rome…

The Difference between Left and Right

In times of increasing division between the Right and the Left, I want to spend a couple of minutes leaving all political tension and controversy aside, approaching the whole problem of Left and Right from a somewhat different angle. In…

A Non-Technical Guide to Turing Machines

..and how they can help us understand our DNA Photo by Brian Kostiuk – @BriKost on Unsplash Turing machines are the ultimate computers. A Universal Turing machine can compute so well, it can even compute other Turing machines that can…

Is the Brain a Quantum Computer?

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay After the mildly clickbaity title, I have to start out with some honesty: we don’t really know if the brain is a quantum computer or not. But as with many a question we don’t…