I visited the Cambridge Google offices last month and talked about Escoffier, umami, Kanye West and the plasticity of dopamine neurons:
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Jonah Lehrer is an editor at large for Seed Magazine. His first book is Proust Was A Neuroscientist. Buy it here.
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Me at Google
Category: Humanities & Social Science
Posted on: July 18, 2008 10:32 AM, by Jonah Lehrer
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Nice talk
By the way, isn't Google the coolest? I visited my brother recently (he works at the Google in Mountain View) and got a tour of the campus. I left feeling inspired about the future of the American workforce. Google has an amazing vision of how companies should operate. First, their mission statement doesn't include profit - it just happens to be a rather successful side effect. Second, they treat their employees extremely well. They invest in employee benefits that do not have obvious economic payoffs (food, transportation, fun in many ways), but clearly this increased happiness translates to company success. There are also a few items which are directly motivational, such as their performance-based pay algorithms. Depending on the achievement of self-defined goals, evaluations from coworkers and supervisors and the success of your projects, you could double your salary in a given year. This, combined with a very flat company structure (cut out the heirarchy crap), motivates their employees to work in creative ways to achieve tangible rewards.
Anyway. If only Google hired bioengineers. But if Google hired bioengeers, that would be scary, so it's a good thing that they don't!
Posted by: Rachael | July 18, 2008 11:45 AM
Another fine presentation Jonah, and timely for me as I just bought Igor Stravinsky's POETICS OF MUSIC, which I will begin reading today, between my experiments at work
Posted by: OftenWrongTed | July 18, 2008 3:00 PM
Thankyou for that. Having studied psychology in pre-umami days, and suffered some dreadful early "scientizing" of aesthetics/sensuality it's a pleasure to see your talk and the likes of Semir Zeki making genuine approaches to the utility and formulaity of Art (appreciation).
As hinted at in many of your comments and the questions that followed, appreciation of, or becoming inured to, or accommodating novelty is a culturally mediated correlate of brain plasticity.
I would hope to see this fit into a framework like Howard Gardner's Multiple Intelligences, perhaps subsuming his "Naturalistic" (bunkum) and Musical intelligences.
Posted by: Michael MacLean | July 18, 2008 4:56 PM
I watched this this morning. I have a couple issues with the Cambridge sound crew (loud buzz, no microphone for audience members asking questions), but the talk was great. I would have never made the connection between cooking, taste receptors, and neuroscience. Great stuff!
ps--It's been years since I've listened to The Rite Of Spring. I'm gonna have to give it another listen.
Posted by: The Science Pundit | July 18, 2008 10:50 PM
It's French, it must be good!
Posted by: jope | July 19, 2008 1:12 AM
I love to cook and your talk is really informative. Thanks for sharing it here.
Posted by: Gay | July 23, 2008 6:02 AM