Bill Clinton is a Neuroscientist : The Frontal Cortex

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Jonah Lehrer is a contributing editor at Wired. He's also written for The New Yorker, Seed, Nature, the Boston Globe and is a contributor to Radio Lab. He's the author of Proust Was A Neuroscientist. His new book is How We Decide.

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Bill Clinton is a Neuroscientist

Category: Culture
Posted on: September 16, 2006 3:04 PM, by Jonah Lehrer

From David Remnick's outstanding profile of Bill Clinton in The New Yorker (not online):

"'I keep reading that Bush is incurious, but when he talks to me he asks a lot of questions,' Clinton went on. 'So I can't give him a bad grade on curiousity. I think both he and his father, because they have peculiar speech patterns, have been underestimated in terms of their intellectual capacity. You know, the way they speak and all, it could be, it could just relate to the way the synapses work in their brain.'"

I just love the reference to neuroscience. The whole article, though scrupulous and fair, makes me deeply nostalgic for the moderate politics of the Clinton era. As Joni Mitchell sang, "You don't know what you've got till it's gone."

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Comments (1)

Bush is quite the academic. He now offers lectures on logic:

"If there's any comparison between the compassion and decency of the American people and the terrorist tactics of extremists, it's flawed logic," Bush said. "It's just � I simply can't accept that."

Posted by: somnilista, FCD | September 16, 2006 9:20 PM