Yohan holds a Ph.D. in Cognitive & Neural Systems from Boston University, and currently works at BU as a postdoc. Before venturing into the labyrinth of neuroscience, he studied physics, receiving a B.Sc. from St. Stephen's College, Delhi, and an M.Sc. from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay. His early childhood was spent in New York, New Jersey and South Carolina, after which he and his family relocated to Coonoor, a little town nestled among the tea estates of the Nilgiri hills in southern India. His ruminations on the interplay between body, mind, and world can be found on his neuroscience blog, and his blog on metaphor. Email: [email protected]
by Yohan J. John Once upon a time there was a village on the edge of a vast jungle. In it there lived a little girl who loved to explore the depths of the jungle. One day she heard a sound she had never heard before. She followed it until she came to a great…
by Yohan J. John Scientists have long acknowledged the power of metaphor and analogy. Properly understood, analogical and metaphorical thinking are not merely ornamental aspects of language, but serve as a bridge from the known to the unknown. Perhaps the most important example of this process was the one that epitomizes the scientific revolution: Isaac…
by Yohan J. John Once, some years ago, I was attending a talk by the philosopher Slavoj Žižek at the Brattle Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He was engaged in his usual counterintuitive mix of lefty politics and pop culture references, and I found myself nodding vigorously. But at one point I asked myself: do I…
by Yohan J. John As a neuroscientist, I am frequently asked about consciousness. In academic discourse, the celebrated problem of consciousness is often divided into two parts: the "Easy Problem" involves identifying the processes in the brain that correlate with particular conscious experiences. The "Hard Problem" involves murkier questions: what are conscious experiences, and why…
by Yohan J. John Ever since Donald Trump's shocking victory in the recent US Presidential Elections, I have gotten a kick out of reminding people of the following: next year we will mark 50 years since the Summer of Love. One response, which I imagine reflects a common sentiment among left-liberals, was a sardonic laugh…
by Yohan J. John I want to make one thing absolutely clear. I am not a Zen Buddhist, I am not advocating Zen Buddhism, I am not trying to convert anyone to it. I have nothing to sell. I'm an entertainer. That is to say, in the same sense, that when you go to a…
by Yohan J. John There's no real downside to engaging with pop culture. If you happen to get into the latest craze, you can participate in collective joy. If it doesn't quite move you, you can join in with the 'haters' and engage in a different but no less enjoyable communal experience. Either way, you…
by Yohan J. John Human decision-making routinely confounds our attempts at understanding. Right now, the western world is in a state of bafflement and anxiety brought on by unprecedented collective decisions. From the British public's vote to leave the European Union to Republican voters' selection of Donald Trump as their presidential candidate, the past month…
by Yohan J. John Ridiculing the intellectual backwardness of our forebears is a popular pastime. How silly our ancestors were! They thought the earth was flat! They believed in dragons and fairies! And even when they started to emerge from humanity's childhood, they came up with ideas like phlogiston! And luminiferous aether! Among neuroscientists, one…
by Yohan J. John There is a story that I think anyone interested in human knowledge ought to know. It comes in many forms. Here is one version, incarnated as a joke: 'A policeman sees a drunk man searching for something under a streetlight and asks what the drunk has lost. He says he lost…
by Yohan J. John I. “You realize fun is a new thing, right?” A few months ago I watched Indian-American comedian Aziz Ansari's new show, Master of None. During the Parents episode, I found myself confronted by a feeling that struck me as rare. I couldn't even tell if it was a good feeling or…
by Yohan J. John [Warning: This essay will feature major spoilers for the latest Star Wars movie, The Force Awakens.] I had two reasons to watch the latest Star Wars movie, The Force Awakens, as soon as I was able. Firstly, I knew that despite all the talk of spoiler warnings and respect for “the…
by Yohan J. John I've always had a problem with the word 'nature'. It seems to serve as a label for multiple, mutually inconsistent notions. This in itself is not a reason to dislike a word — we seem to have little problem with most words that have multiple meanings. (Surely “right” as in “right…
by Yohan J. John What is a person? Does each of us have some fundamental essence? Is it the body? Is it the mind? Is it something else entirely? Versions of this question seem always to have animated human thought. In the aftermath of the scientific revolution, it seems as if one category of answer…
by Yohan J. John This is the era of metrics: it seems that if we are to hack a path through the information jungle of the 21st century, we must be armed with an arsenal of scores, quantities, indices, factors, grades, and ratings. Our corporate and governmental overlords seem most comfortable parlaying in the seemingly…
by Yohan J. John Probability theory is a relative newcomer in the history of ideas. It was only in the 19th century, two centuries after Isaac Newton ushered in the scientific revolution, that thinkers began to systematize the laws of chance. In just a few generations, the language of probability has seeped into popular discourse…
by Yohan J. John We are routinely told that we live in a brave new Information Age. Every aspect of human life — commerce, entertainment, education, and perhaps even the shape of consciousness itself — seems to be undergoing an information-driven revolution. The tools for storing and sharing information are becoming faster, more ubiquitous, and…
by Yohan J. John The DNA molecule is often described as the book of life, as a blueprint for constructing the organism, or as a program for computing the organism. These metaphors have become so pervasive that we often forget that they are metaphors. In this essay I'd like to take this class of metaphor…
by Yohan J. John In Part I of this series, we looked at how the concept of information brought communication and computation together. Claude Shannon and the other pioneers of information theory showed that discrete symbols could be used to encode and transmit almost any sort of message, and that binary digits were the simplest…
by Yohan J. John Metaphor is a hallmark of human communication, and a vital tool of scientific thinking. Along with its more formal cousin, analogy, metaphor allows us to create linguistic and conceptual bridges from the known to the unknown. Some of the greatest breakthroughs in science began with an analogical leap between seemingly unrelated…