Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, associate professor and director of the Information and Innovation Policy Research Center at National University of Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy discusses his new book Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age.
From http://www.wnyc.org/shows/bl/episodes/2009/10/06/segments/142076
This hour, Radiolab examines Stochasticity, which is just a wonderfully slippery and smarty-pants word for randomness. How big a role does randomness play in our lives? Do we live in a world of magic and meaning or … is it all just chance and happenstance? To tackle this question, we look at the role chance and randomness play in sports, lottery tickets, and even the cells in our own body. Along the way, we talk to a woman suddenly consumed by a frenzied gambling addiction, two friends whose meeting seems purely providential, and some very noisy bacteria.
Jonah Lehrer is editor-at-large for Seed Magazine and a contributing editor at NPR`S Radio Lab.
Since Plato, philosophers have described the decision-making process as either rational or emotional: we carefully deliberate or we blink and go with our gut. But as scientists break open the minds black box with the latest tools of neuroscience, theyre discovering this is not how the mind works.
Jonah Lehrer, author and editor-at-large for Seed Magazine, suggests that our best decisions are a finely tuned blend of both feeling and reason and the precise mix depends on the situation. The trick is to determine when to lean on which part of the brain, and to do this, we need to think harder (and smarter) about how we think.
In conversation with Dr. Larry Swanson, Appleman Professor of Biological Sciences, USC, Jonah Lehrer, the author of Proust Was a Neuroscientist and creator of the Frontal Cortex blog draws on cutting-edge research and the real-world experience of a wide range of "deciders" to arm us with the tools we need to think harder (and smarter) about how we think.
http://kcet.org/local/podcasts/aloud/2009/03/how-we-decide.html