By Steven Johnson

Greetings, all. As Zack alluded to below, I've just started to talk publicly a little about my next book, Mind Wide Open, due to be published in early 2004. So the timing for his guest-blog couldn't be more appropriate. Over the next few days I'll talk about some of the book's themes, hopefully tied to whatever is floating around the blogosphere this week.

I thought I'd start with a quick response to something that Pat wrote in one of his typically brilliant posts from last week. He talked about the opposition between the "the old hominid responses: that repetoire of savannah inheritances, tragic and comic, that have become a consoling pop-science myth for so many people" and the "the scary but exciting area of neurosocial innovation," with its "carefully-calibrated drugs open[ing] new doors of perception."

When I read this, it occurred to me that what has interested me about brain science the most over the past few years -- and what forms the cornerstone of this new book -- lies precisely in the middle ground between these two approaches. The evolutionary psychologists explain how our brains are wired, and the neurotechnologists speculate about re-wiring them. My interest is more prosaic, I suppose, but also I think more immediate, and maybe more useful, at least in the short term.

What I'm interested in his how simply understanding your brain's inner life -- both seeing it in action via imaging technologies, and simply learning about brain science in general -- can change the way that you think about yourself as an individual, your own quirks and passions and habits and fears.

So while I'm fascinated by (and have learned an immense amount from) both the "hominid" and the "neurosocial" approach, I'm right now interested in the plasticity that comes from neurologically-informed introspection. What happens to our layperson brains now that we're able to talk about our mental events in a much more direct, non-metaphoric language? Even without those carefully-calibrated drugs, understanding how thinking works will surely change the way we think. The question is: what kind of change is likely?