BOOKS
The Genesis of Genius
The hardy seeds of scientific passion can take root almost anywhere
By Jennifer Kahn

Curious Minds: How a Child Becomes a Scientist
Edited by John Brockman
Pantheon Books, $23.95
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Courtesy of Sherry Turkle Ethnographer Sherry Turkle imagined herself at age 8 as a roller-skating Nancy Drew. |
As a toddler, future physicist Freeman Dyson spent his afternoon nap time playing with numbers instead of sleeping. “I added one plus a half plus a quarter plus an
eighth plus a sixteenth and so on, and I discovered that if you go on adding like this forever you end up with two,” he recalls. “I had discovered infinite series.”
Dyson’s precocious feat may seem like a fairly typical beginning for a brilliant thinker. Yet few of the 27 scientists whose autobiographies appear in Curious Minds repeat Dyson’s tale—which is what makes the collection so compelling. Indeed, rather than revealing a secret formula that produces an adult scientist, this collection proves just how disparate are the ingredients. Scientific passion can percolate among early and late bloomers, the privileged and the poor, social misfits and stars.
Editor John Brockman’s “unruly bunch” of essayists includes Mary Catherine Bateson, an anthropologist who as a child took notes on her playmates; Richard Dawkins, a zoologist who learned about
Courtesy of Marc Hauser |
Courtesy of Steven Pinker |
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The Quest for Consciousness: A Neurobiological Approach
By Christof Koch; Roberts & Company, $45
How does the smell of a rain-soaked dog or the sight of a jungle scene evoke a conscious feeling? In this highly readable college-level text, Caltech cognitive scientist Koch argues that consciousness arises from the chatter of interconnected networks of neurons. Check out the chapter on “the zombie within” to find out how often we operate automatically in the absence of conscious control.
—Maia Weinstock





