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David J. Linden is a Professor of Neuroscience at Johns Hopkins University, and the author of The Accidental Mind: How Brain Evolution has Given Us Love, Memory, Dreams, and God,[1] as well as a related blog[2].

As of July 1st, 2008, he will be the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Neurophysiology [[3]].

Contents 1 Personal Life 2 Neuroscience 3 Controversy 4 Selected Writings 5 = Other External Links =

[edit] Personal Life

Born in 1961, Professor Linden grew up in Santa Monica, California; his father was a well-regarded psychiatrist in Los Angeles. His mother is an editor who has relocated to New Mexico in recent years.

Professor Linden attended Santa Monica High School, where he associated with a crowd that called itself "The Olive Starlight Orchestra," or "The Olives" for short. He knew people like Sandra Tsing Loh, Daphne Nugent, Jan Steckel[4], Paul Lockhart, Keith Goldfarb[5], Greg Turk, and Janine Ellen Young. The Olives were loosely affiliated with Loh's organization at Samohi, The Young Bureaucrats, and were referred to by blogger and crime writer Joy McCann as "the late 20th Century's Bloomsbury Group." (Of course, the group continues into the 21st Century.)

Dr. Linden is an amateur photographer, and has had a few private exhibitions, including one that featured pictures of house paint, and one in the 1990s that concentrated on images of neon signage.

Linden lives in Baltimore with his wife, an ethnomusicologist, his son, and his daughter.

[edit] Neuroscience

David Linden's first lab job was at John C. Liebeskind's pain research lab at UCLA for one summer during his undergraduate years, a position he summarized as "doing mean things to rats." Years later he described his career as being "the Dr. Mengele of rats."

Linden's undergraduate years were spent at University of California, Berkeley; he did his graduate work at Northwestern in Evanston, Illinois. He also worked briefly at Hoffmann-La Roche Inc., in Nutley, New Jersey. The aspect of his work that appeals to "lay people" is becoming popular on college campuses, which has led to appearances around the country in which he discusses quirky facts about brain chemistry, and gobbles up time on public radio stations being interviewed about same.

His blog contains musings about the way the world works, snippets of information on neurobiology, and photographs from his travels.

[edit] Controversy

Following a heated exchange of e-mails, World Affairs Monthly editor Thomas R. Pochari wrote that "Linden is foremost a 'Professor of Zionism' and little else."[6]

In a May, 2008, blog posting, Linden mentioned that he has received death threats from "creationists" since the publication of The Accidental Mind.[7]

[edit] Selected Writings

• The Accidental Mind: How Brain Evolution Has Given Us Love, Memory, Dreams, and God ISBN 978-0-674-02478-6
• From Molecules to Memory in the Cerebellum, Science, September 19, 2003[8]
• Neon Lights up the Night (with Joanne Trestrail), Chicago, May 1986 [9]

[edit] = Other External Links =

[|Biography] at The Physiologist