How do we have insights, and where does inspiration come from? Jonah Lehrer goes inside Bob Dylan's brain to find out...the "neural correlate of insight": the anterior superior temporal gyrus (aSTG). This small fold of tissue, located on the surface of the right hemisphere just above the ear, became unusually active in the seconds before the epiphany. [more inside]
posted by nickyskye on Apr 7, 2012 - 22 comments

What is a library? What do librarians do? Librarians from the 2011 ALIA conference in Sydney respond - and their answers can be surprising.
posted by divabat on May 18, 2011 - 24 comments

Honda insight 1.3 IMA SE Hybrid: "So here goes. It’s terrible. Biblically terrible. Possibly the worst new car money can buy. It’s the first car I’ve ever considered crashing into a tree, on purpose, so I didn’t have to drive it any more."
posted by Antidisestablishmentarianist on May 20, 2009 - 180 comments

"That's why so many insights happen during warm showers."[pdf/html]
A print-only print-mostly article in last week's New Yorker magazine fascinatingly describes the neurological processes behind human insight, with nods to Henri Poincaré's omnibus eureka ("Having reached Coutances, we entered an omnibus to go some place or other. At the moment when I put my foot on the step the idea came to me, without anything in my former thoughts seeming to have paved the way for it") and Archimedes' bathtub eureka* ("Eureka!")
posted by jckll on Jul 30, 2008 - 33 comments

In her new book written with Catherine Johnson, Animals in Translation (NYTimes), Dr Temple Grandin, an animal behavior expert and inventor of the squeeze machine, uses her experiences with autism to explore the intricacies of animal behavior. She argues that animals do have consciousness, that language is not a prerequisite and other theories that bring insight into both animal and human behavior. (More)
posted by effwerd on Jan 11, 2005 - 34 comments

The Two Things. "For every subject, there are really only two things you really need to know. Everything else is the application of those two things, or just not important.”
posted by majcher on Jun 11, 2004 - 23 comments

A nice little cool-site compendium featured in this week's CA | Design Interact Insight series. It's described as an idea generator for new media designers, and it's got quite the collection... my favorite so far is German design firm Milla's site (Flash)
posted by silusGROK on Nov 27, 2001 - 3 comments