Sandra Blakeslee is a freelance science writer and science correspondent for The New York Times and lives in Santa Fe. Her specialty is cognitive neuroscience. Her most recent book, with V. S. Ramachandran, is Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind. She is also co-author, with Dr. Judith Wallerstein, of The Good Marriage: How and Why Love Lasts (Houghton Mifflin) and Second Chances: Men, Women and Children a Decade after Divorce (Ticknor and Fields).

photo by Peter West