SINCE Healing the Hardware of the Soul was first released in 2002, the use of brain imaging has exploded into the American consciousness. Virtually every week, major newspapers and magazines are reporting on a brain-imaging study related to some aspect of human behavior, such as our buying tendencies, mating habits, aggressive proclivities, and political persuasions. How could it be otherwise? The brain is involved in everything we do and everything we are. It truly remains the hardware of the soul. Now, brain-imaging technology is beginning to live up to some of the promises discussed in this book.

Not one to avoid controversy, I wrote a tongue-in-cheek Op-Ed piece for the Los Angeles Times in December 2007 on whether we should perform brain scans on political candidates. The president of the United States is the most powerful person on earth, so before we vote for someone, shouldn’t we know if he or she has a brain that works correctly? I was not really expecting anyone to take up the idea, but I was weary of the country’s being run by presidents who showed clear brain abnormalities, from Reagan’s memory issues to Clinton’s struggles with impulsivity to Bush’s cognitive rigidity.

Tucker Carlson of MSNBC read the piece and asked to interview me on his show. Toward the end of the interview he said: “This is my key and final question. Where is free will in this? So if you gave Clinton a brain scan and it said this guy is going to have impulse-control and self-control issues, it doesn’t allow for his own will in the equation. Does it?”