Yohan holds a Ph.D. in Cognitive & Neural Systems from Boston University, and currently works at BU as a postdoc. Before venturing into the labyrinth of neuroscience, he studied physics, receiving a B.Sc. from St. Stephen's College, Delhi, and an M.Sc. from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay. His early childhood was spent in New York, New Jersey and South Carolina, after which he and his family relocated to Coonoor, a little town nestled among the tea estates of the Nilgiri hills in southern India. His ruminations on the interplay between body, mind, and world can be found on his neuroscience blog, and his blog on metaphor. Email: yohan.john@gmail.com
by Yohan J. John “Neuroscience is ruining the humanities”. This was the provocative title of a recent article by Arthur Krystal in The Chronicle of Higher Education. To me the question was pure clickbait [1], since I am both a neuroscientist and an avid spectator of the drama and intrigue on the other side of…
by Yohan J. John I. Before the scientific age, boundaries between disciplines were not that sharply defined. Many cultures around the world saw art, music, mathematics and theology as reflections of each other. Perhaps the most poetic expression of this idea was the Pythagorean notion of the musica universalis: the harmony of the spheres. According…
by Yohan J. John “Mine is a dizzying country in which the Lottery is a major element of reality; until this day, I have thought as little about it as about the conduct of the indecipherable gods or of my heart.” –The Lottery in Babylon by Jorge Luis Borges In his classic short story The…
by Yohan J. John What is the mind? And what is its relationship with the body? Philosophers, psychologists, cognitive scientists and neuroscientists have all attempted to bring their professional heft to bear on the “mind-body problem”, but consensus remains elusive. At best, mainstream academics and researchers share a metaphysical commitment: the belief that the seemingly…
by Yohan J. John Attitudes toward science in the public sphere occupy an interesting spectrum. At one extreme there are the cheerleaders — those who seem to think that science is the disembodied spirit of progress itself, and will usher us into a brave new world of technological transcendence, in which we will merge with…
by Yohan J. John The osmosis of neuroscience into popular culture is neatly symbolized by a phenomenon I recently chanced upon: neurochemical-inspired jewellery. It appears there is a market for silvery pendants shaped like molecules of dopamine, serotonin, acetylcholine, norepinephrine and other celebrity neurotransmitters. Under pictures of dopamine necklaces, the neuro-jewellers have placed words like…
by Yohan J. John No one knows exactly how life began, but a pivotal chapter in the story was the formation of the first single-celled organism — the common ancestor to every living thing on the planet. I like to think of the birth of life as the creation of the first boundary — the…
by Yohan J. John “Little does my lady dream / Rumpelstiltskin is my name!” Rumplestiltskin, by Anne Anderson. Image from Wikimedia Commons Of all the strange and wonderful fairy tales I encountered as a child, Rumpelstiltskin always struck me as the most peculiar. The story revolves around a girl who must spin straw into gold…