Thinkologist: The Dudley Lynch Blog on Brain Change

The physicist-turned-healer (G*d rest his soul—he’s no longer with us) fulminated against eating too much garlic. He said gorging on “the stinking rose” is a very bad thing for the brain.
He reasoned this way:
Garlic contains a poison called sulfone hydroxyl. The sulfone hydroxyl ion, he alleged, can penetrate the brain’s blood barrier. Heavy garlic eaters, [...]

Valentine’s Day is just around the corner. That means every blogger and her bird dog are thinking about sex. But then, who needs Valentine’s Day as an excuse to think about sex?
The brain—as every psychobabble and (as you are seeing) thinking-skills aficionado is sure to remind you eventually—is arguably our major sex organ. So it [...]

In the early fall of 2008, my colleague, Dr. Paul Kordis, and I promoted a new book idea to some of Madison Avenue’s top literary agents. Soon, we were being greeted every few days by a sound familiar to writers: a Bronx cheer.
In the book business, that translates to “Get lost, dullard!”
Reading our rejection [...]

Friends of ours told us the other night about their grandson, now 7, who lives just down the street from them. That means he spends a lot of nights at their place, school nights included. And that means either his grandmother or his granddad (but usually his grandmother) is freighted with the task of rousting [...]

I don’t often experience writer’s block. Sleeping on a topic overnight is nearly always enough to return a free flow of ideas and images. But it was not working that way with this thing called The Singularity. For days, I tried without success to tie a literary bow around a supposition that had fast become [...]

I’ve had a lifelong patchiness in my relationship to science fiction. In the up part of the cycle, I devour it and read—or watch—little else. Once I discovered Frank Herbert’s Dune saga novels, with their giant, spice-protecting sandworms in the deserts of Arrakis and all else, I had to read them all, and did so [...]

You don’t have to spend much time googling or digging—or doing that old-fashioned thing: reading a book—these days to realize that the brain is often up to its usual tricks when the subject is neuroscientific research.
That is, the brain is simply going about its business. Sometimes, it lights up like a Christmas tree on the [...]

About Twitter: some can and some can’t. Those who can, in some fashion or another, have been doing it all along, because, at its most basic, tweeting is gossiping. Those who can’t do it well simply won’t, at least for long. According to the Nielson Company, that includes about 60 percent of those who at [...]

In the early 1990s, we traveled around Europe together for several weeks. Mostly by train, a few times by car, as we produced business seminars. He was a brainy, ambitious, sparely worded chap. A sly sense of humor: dry, cowboy-ish. Very good English, too, polished during an extended sojourn in America—he once addressed the downtown [...]

Trust is a precious metal in my periodic table of people qualities, although I tend toward optimism that it can be justified. As readers of Dr. Paul Kordis’ and my book, Strategy of the Dolphin, know, it is a worldview thing with me. Evil, stupidity and blind belief show up much too often to treat [...]