This Will Make You Smarter

New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking

The world's smartest website... Edge is a salon for the world's finest minds

Imagine inviting some of the world's top thinkers round to your place and asking them to tell you one thing that would make you smarter. No need to imagine: John Brockman has done it, by getting 150 of the planet's smartest minds to offer a neat insight each

John Brockman is the founder and publisher of the influential science salon Edge.org. He is the CEO of the literary agency Brockman Inc., and lives in New York City.

Over 150 of the world's leading scientists and thinkers offer their choice of the ideas, strategies and arguments that will help all of us understand our world, and its future, better. 
 
Includes contributions from: 
Richard Dawkins, Stephen Pinker, Daniel Dennett, Clay Shirky, Daniel Goleman, Sam Harris, Lee Smolin, Matt Ridley, Mark Henderson, David Rowan, Sir Martin Rees, Craig Venter, Brian Eno, Jaron Lanier and David Brooks . . . among others. 
 
With his organisation Edge.org, the literary agent and all-purpose intellectual impresario John Brockman has brought together the most influential thinkers of our age. Every year he sets them a question, this year that question was: 
What Scientific Concept Would Improve Everybody's Cognitive Toolkit? 
 
Their answers are collected in this book and explore philosophy, psychology, economics, and other disciplines - and all share one aim: to provide the most reliable ways of gaining knowledge about anything, whether it be human behaviour, corporate behaviour, the fate of the planet, or the future of the universe.

John Brockman

An engrossing treat of a book... Crammed with hugely enjoyable anecdotes...You'll have a wonderful time reading these reminiscences

These essays offer the idiosyncrasy and curiosity value that we expect of good, narrative history, combined with much fine writing... Absorbing and persuasive in just the way good stories are

consistently enthralling memoirs by leading thinkers...the result is a remarkably dud-free collection

How a Child Becomes a Scientist

Curious Minds is a book of original, autobiographical essays by twenty-seven scientists, including Paul Davies, Richard Dawkins, Daniel C. Dennett, Freeman Dyson, Murray Gell-Mann, Nicholas Humphrey, Lynn Margulis, Steven Pinker and Robert M. Sapolsky. 
 
Each writer attempts to identify that moment or those influences in his or her youth which triggered the determination to become a scientist. Was there a particular event or set of circumstances? To what extent did parents, peers of teachers contribute? Why mathematics rather than psychology; why biology rather than physics? What were the turning points, mistakes, epiphanies? 
 
Personal, passionate, revealing, enthralling, Curious Minds tells as much about life as it does about science.

John Brockman

Praise for Curious Minds

An engrossing treat of a book... Crammed with hugely enjoyable anecdotes...You'll have a wonderful time reading these reminiscences

These essays offer the idiosyncrasy and curiosity value that we expect of good, narrative history, combined with much fine writing... Absorbing and persuasive in just the way good stories are

consistently enthralling memoirs by leading thinkers...the result is a remarkably dud-free collection

An engrossing treat of a book... Crammed with hugely enjoyable anecdotes...You'll have a wonderful time reading these reminiscences

These essays offer the idiosyncrasy and curiosity value that we expect of good, narrative history, combined with much fine writing... Absorbing and persuasive in just the way good stories are

consistently enthralling memoirs by leading thinkers...the result is a remarkably dud-free collection

An engrossing treat of a book... Crammed with hugely enjoyable anecdotes...You'll have a wonderful time reading these reminiscences

These essays offer the idiosyncrasy and curiosity value that we expect of good, narrative history, combined with much fine writing... Absorbing and persuasive in just the way good stories are

consistently enthralling memoirs by leading thinkers...the result is a remarkably dud-free collection

Books by John Brockman

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