Jonah Lehrer: toward a vocation

It started coming together in college when, like so many undergrads, I was scrambling to connect the dots. I was interested in poetry. I was interested in mathematics. I was interested in Nietzsche. All these different interests came together in neuroscience.

The beauty of the human brain is that it’s where all this comes from; it’s the wellspring. And that’s how I fell into neuroscience. Neuroscience seemed like a natural way to bring together a really disparate group of interests.

So I wanted to be a scientist. That’s what I assumed. I worked in Eric Kandel‘s lab for a number of years, but only after four-and-a-half years did I realize I wasn’t that good at it! To be a great scientist, you have to love the manual labor of science. You have to love the empiricism. And I didn’t.

I was too lazy. I wasn’t disciplined enough. I wasn’t good at taking big, profound questions and breaking them down into testable chunks. And from that failure—and at the time it felt like a total failure—I somehow became a science writer.