Ferry Plaza Book Party: Judith Horstman

LEFT COAST WRITERS BOOK LAUNCH:  Judith Horstman, Author of The Scientific American Brave New Brain

 

 

 

 

Judith Horstman

Monday, June 14, 2010 || 6pm
Book Passage || Ferry Plaza
San Francisco || www.bookpassage.com

 

 

Microchips in your brain. Thought-controlled technology. Cures for Alzheimer’s, depression, and mental retardation.  Treatments to erase memories, pills to make you smarter, and bionic spare parts to restore lost neural functions.

Sound like science fiction? Science fiction, meet science fact. These and more startling probabilities, based on current and ongoing research in neuroscience, are engagingly explored in The Scientific American Brave New Brain (Jossey-Bass). Gleaning from the latest research and articles from Scientific American and Scientific American Mind, journalist Judith Horstman offers a comprehensive and entertaining gaze into the science—and wonders—possible in our brains’ very near future. Contrasting science fiction of the recent past and present with scientific breakthroughs that can be even more fantastic, Horstman shows what could be in store for our brains over the next few decades and the potential economic, legal and ethical fallout of this rampant change and progress.

Based on research outlined in the book, experts’ top five predictions for the future of mental power are that:

  • Microchips in or on our brains will enhance memory, store data, and connect wirelessly to the internet, eliminating our cell phones and allowing us to control machines via mental Wi-Fi.
  • Advances in neuroscience and bioengineering will render Alzheimer’s, brain damage, depression and perhaps even mental retardation largely preventable, curable and possibly reversible.
  • Neuroenhancers – from smart pills to mechanical devices – will improve thinking, enhance creativity, relieve depression, erase traumatic memories and boost mental endurance.
  • Bionic or biological spare brain parts that already restore hearing and give sight to the blind could restore movement and speech to the paralyzed—and give super powers to the healthy.
  • Neuroimaging that now “reads” brains to detect disease will be able to accurately detect deception, antisocial tendencies, and dangerous inclinations––in addition to predicting behavior.

Find out how neuroscience, brain-machine interfaces, neuroimaging, psychopharmacology, epigenetics, the Internet, and our own minds are stimulating and enhancing the future of mental power.

Judith Horstman (Sacramento, CA) is an award-winning journalist and author whose work has appeared in USA Today and numerous magazines, publications by Harvard, Stanford, and Johns Hopkins universities, and on the Internet. She is the author of four other books including The Scientific American Day in the Life of Your Brain. Visit her Web site at www.JudithHorstman.com