In addition to being an author, dynamic speaker and a consultant in demand to trial lawyers nationwide, Eric Oliver has been the chief contributor, editor and publisher of News From the Mental Edge since its first issue was printed in the late '80's. The insightful and informative newsletter explores and emphasizes brain-friendly communication by lawyers, who prefer to balance the influence of the visual, verbal and nonverbal messages they can't help producing. By adopting these approaches through every step of a case, from discovery to any form of resolution, Eric's attorney clients have produced consistent and remarkable successes for their clients, and how they’ve accomplished it feature prominently in each issue. Several readers say their older issues stay in their briefcases for years, repeatedly used as an invaluable resource from deposition to mediation to trial.

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Winter 2010 Issue Highlights:

GENERATIONAL MYTH
By Siva Vaidhyanathan
*Originally appeared in Chronicle of Higher Education, Sept. 19, 2008

Reprinted with author's permission

Not all young people are tech-savvy.
Consider all the pundits, professors, and pop critics who have wrung their hands over the inadequacies of the so-called digital generation of young people filling our colleges and jobs. Then consider those commentators who celebrate the creative brilliance of digitally adept youth. To them all, I want to ask: Whom are you talking about? There is no such thing as a "digital generation."

In the introduction to his book Print Is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age (Macmillan) last year, Jeff Gomez posits that young Americans constitute a distinct generation that shares a sensibility: resistance to the charms of printed and bound books. Gomez, who has been a sales-and-marketing director for a number of global publishers, has written a trade book whose title and thesis demands that we ignore it. Alas, I could not.

"The needs of an entire generation of 'Digital Natives' — kids who have grown up with the Internet, and are accustomed to the entire world being only a mouse click away — are going unanswered by traditional print media like books, magazines, and newspapers," Gomez writes. "For this generation — which Googles rather than going to the library — print seems expensive, a bore, and a waste of time."

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THE TRUTH IS, SPOTTING A LIE ISN'T AS EASY AS IT LOOKS
By Neely Tucker
Originally appeared in Washington Post, February 15th, 2009
Reprinted with permission.

Science is closing in on humanoids and their seedy necessity to lie about al¬most everything, but don't worry. We've had tens of thousands of years of practice at it, and until you stick your head inside a machine that plays with the protons in your brain so that it can film the neurons firing in your prefrontal cortex, you can probably get away with it.

Neurological research is showing that lies are so interwoven into our cen¬tral nervous systems that it's not even an unnatural act. Lies require work in at least five sections of the brain, and to separate them from the truth requires machinations that make rocket science look like 2 + 2. Otherwise, lie and truth are indistinguishable.

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