The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World

Research done at the BMJ itself indicates that having the value of a paper judged by the editor, or at least a small group of editorial staff, would be likely to produce just as good results, while obviously being much quicker, much less expensive, completely transparent, less open to malpractice, no more prone to bias, and no longer wasteful of th

Attention changes the world. How you attend to it changes what it is you find there. What you find then governs the kind of attention you will think it appropriate to pay in the future. And so it is that the world you recognise (which will not be exactly the same as my world) is ‘firmed up’ – and brought into being.

Though truth is always my personal judgment, it is not just possible, but necessary, that my judgment should take into account yours and many others. It is far from random, but is, rather, informed by experiment, perception, reason, intuition and imagination. That doesn’t make it less reliable than being informed by a single source, such as reason,

In the face of such overwhelming evidence of the inadequacy of the machine model to the study of living organisms, why, then, does this product of the mid-Victorian mindset persist? One reason is its simplicity. We are familiar with machines, and because they are what we are used to making, taking apart and putting together, it is perhaps a natural

It is quite impossible for genes to ‘programme’ the making of an embryo. For a start, there is nowhere near enough information contained in genes. Consider the human brain, never mind the whole human body. With an estimated 100 billion neurones, a quarter of a million of them are created on average during every minute of the nine months of gestatio