Glossing over of Jonah Lehrer’s writing

Jonah Lehrer starts his essay by talking about advances in science where for the first time we as humans were uncertain if we would be able to understand the cosmos as a whole. Things such as black holes and atoms are such wild ideas that it is hard to fully grasp the concept. There are certain things that are hard for us to understand, or even visualize. The Heisenberg’s uncertainty principal is the idea where at any given time there is no way to 100% predict where any electron will be in a cloud. Trying to talk about atomic particles that are to small for us to see with our eyes provides the issue of visualizing it. How can you expect to fully understand something if you are a visual learner. I think this part of his essay is trying to show us all of the different ways that people can learn complex ideas with art. For example if you are a visual learner than you can

Jonah then discusses “The bridging principle”. This is where he says that basically there is a strong group of people with a background in art and there is another group of people who have a strong background in science. Now the bridging principal is the idea of having a third group of people who are a combination of both. This eliminates the gap between the two so that people are thinking with the best of both worlds. Next he goes on to talk about Reductionism. Reductionism is where you are breaking complex ideas down into simpler chunks that are easier for people to understand in pieces. This really just a big word for yet another learning strategy. The next part of his essay is a little weird. He discusses they synapse as the in-between of what we create and what we are. We understand what we make but we still don’t understand fully what makes us us. Here is a quote from his work “In fact, the logic of reductionism implies that our self-consciousness is really an elaborate illusion, an epiphenomenon generated by some electrical shudder in the frontal cortex. There is no ghost in the machine; there is only the vibration of the machinery. Your head contains 100 billion electrical cells, but not one of them is you, or knows or cares about you.” -Jonah Lehrer I think what he is trying to say here is that when we break down what our body does to process information we don’t understand what makes us individuals. So how can we possibly understand that by using only scientific methods. To fully understand something you need a Holistic perspective. This is another way to say the big picture. The last thing that Jonah discusses is metaphors. Basically what he says is that is is very hard to explain something to someone without using a metaphor.