Jonah Lehrer is a Contributing Editor at Wired and the author of How We Decide and Proust Was a Neuroscientist. He graduated from Columbia University and studied at Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar. He has written for The New Yorker, Nature, Seed, The Washington Post and The Boston Globe. He is also a Contributing Editor at Scientific American Mind and National Public Radio's Radio Lab.

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Many of our economic, social and environmental problems have solutions.  Some of these solutions are obvious.  But most of them are difficult, or we would have already employed them. What’s stopping us? Maybe it's as simple as this: Various economic, belief and affinity groups are able to wield veto power on progress.

Cultural change, like biological evolution, can be incremental.  But it can also be sudden and transformational.  It appears we’re in the middle of rapid environmental, political and cultural change. Change occurs when one paradigm loses power, and another replaces it.  But how does that happen?  And how do we participate in that process to bring about the future we want?

Past Illahee speakers have touched upon the subject of power and change in various ways.  We’ve invited some of them back, and have added some new faces, to focus on what appears to be a rapid social transformation – what it is, where we might be going, and what we can do - ten years into the 21st century.

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