Posted by: Jeff Warren - Author of The Head Trip

In keeping with the associative spirit of my last blog entry, I would like to make some wild generalizations about science journalism. I would say that most science journalism is inherently conservative. That is to say, science journalists want to get it right, so they often ground their arguments in consensus. Like Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything or Jay Ingram’s Theatre of the Mind, they do chart the disputes, but the knowledge they deal in is essentially consolidated knowledge. It’s the hard foundational matter on which the sturdy edifice of workaday science is built. This is terrific and important science writing, the kind I love to gobble up, but it is not really the kind of science writing that I do.

I prefer to play around at the more dangerous leading edge of science. This, too, is where science happens. But it’s fraught with peril here because there’s a lot less consensus. This is especially true when it comes to the mind, which can be looked at through so many lenses—philosophical, neurological, psychological, phenomenological. Here everything is in flux. It’s a rowdy scrimmage of vague experiments, stirring anecdotes, wild speculation, emotional ego wars, new theories, old evidence, new evidence, old theories, and looming over at all, the dreaded “paradigm.”

Do we need a new so-called “paradigm” to understand the mind, or is that just New Age balderdash, relativistic Kuhnian wunder-fiddling, the kind that makes the Richard Dawkinses and Steven Weinbergs and Patricia Churchlands of the world reach for their guns? It’s too early to say. But it’s great fun for me as a writer to throw myself into this scrimmage and try to piece together a calm and coherent narrative. For me the best tools for writing this way are creative, and have to do with a book’s form and structure and tone. Which doesn’t mean you have to abandon all reason and sense—you don’t. There’s still a certain journalistic responsibility to point out the controversies and be transparent when transitioning from sober analysis to woolly speculation. But, as I say, it is more fun out here on the leading edge. This is where the Big Game graze—the freaks and the fights and the eerie sights. This is where to come to fire your imagination. Because—and this is the crucial point—scientists come here too. For many of them the leading edge may even be what drew them to science in the first place.