Neurophilosophy

Tomorrow’s edition of Nature contains a short review of The Open Laboratory, called “Bloggers Unite!.” There’s no mention of yours truly, and you’ll need to be subscribed to the journal, or have institutional access to it, in order to read it, so here are the essential points:

By their nature, blogs are dynamic. A post typically bristles with links out to elsewhere on the web and accretes an ever-changing exchange of comments between readers and the author. To capture this energy and texture in a static book is a challenge that the editor fully acknowledges in his introduction. The solution [editor] Zivkovic fixes on…is to pick posts that he feels work in isolation, to list links as footnotes and to omit the comment strings.

The results of this snapshot editing process are mixed, and sometimes sloppy…[but] the entries highlight the great variety of styles that can thrive in the blogosphere. Most of the pieces are a little chattier than the usual book or magazine article, but those chosen are formal enough not to grate on the printed page. Occasionally, the prose is loftier than a typical popular science book.

The book works well enough as a standalone anthology of science writing, but I share the editor’s hope that it will prompt eager print readers hitherto unfamiliar with the vibrant young medium that is science blogging to have a look, and maybe even have a go…It will be interesting to see how this project develops over coming years as the blogosphere itself evolves.

Bora, who compiled and edited the book, is taking nominations for Open Lab 2007, so if you’ve written a post that you think is particularly good, or have read something one someone else’s blog which you think deserves to be included, don’t hesitate to submit it. I’m very pleased that Bora wants to include yesterday’s post about trepanation in next year’s book. However, I seem to remember that referencing the old quotes I used in The Discovery of the Neuron, which was included in the first book, was a nightmare. The essay about trepanation also contains obscure quotes whose origins may prove very difficult to trace, as well as a number of images from digitized versions of rare books, the use of which is probably restricted.

UPDATE: There’s also a very short editorial about the Open Lab project.