Jonah Lehrer is an editor at large for Seed Magazine. His first book is Proust Was A Neuroscientist. Buy it here.
June 30, 2006
Category: Neuroscience
So we now have a short list of some great but forgotten psychologists: Karen Horney: "Neurosis and Human Growth" Frederic Bartlett: "Remembering" Kurt Lewin William James: "Pragmatism" Alfred Adler Edward Tolman John Dewey George Mead Keep the suggestions coming!...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 6:29 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Neuroscience
Why can't we supress laughter? I have no idea, but this video is hilarious. It's also a little cruel. I dare you not to laugh....
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 3:04 PM • 11 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
I've really enjoyed Olivia Judson's columns on Times $elect. They've been funny, eloquent and haven't shied away from the biological nitty-gritty. In her last column, she ends with a meditation on three questions she wants evolutionary biologists to solve: The...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:30 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Culture
From The Daily Telegraph: Scientists who carry out embryonic stem cell research and politicians who pass laws permitting the practice will be excommunicated, the Vatican said yesterday. "Destroying human embryos is equivalent to an abortion. It is the same thing,"...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:17 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 29, 2006
It seems that supply and demand are compensating for the ineffectual policies of the Bush Adminstration. An Energy Information Adminstration press release announced the following: U.S. carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels increased by 0.1 percent in 2005, from...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 5:05 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Culture
I've lived in New Hampshire for almost a year now, and I'm still not used to the constant presence of presidential hopefuls. Yesterday, Bill was here. Pataki was supposed to come, but the floods kept him in NY. In the...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 11:10 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Neuroscience
Did you know that we can thrive with only half a brain? Weird. The New Yorker has a wonderful article documenting the lives of patients who live through these hemispherectomies. The strangest thing is that no one knows how they...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:15 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Neuroscience
Over at Small Gray Matters, there is an excellent critique of my last post on fMRI. Here is the nut graf: While fMRI certainly has important technical limitations people should be aware of (low spatial and temporal resolution, high costs...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:03 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 28, 2006
Category: Neuroscience
Mixing Memory's post on the undeserved obscurity of Franz Brentano got me thinking. What other great scientists of mind are modern neuroscientists neglecting? My own vote goes to William James. While his Principles of Psychology are often mandatory reading in...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 4:21 PM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
The blogosphere has begun debating the merits of fMRI. That's a good thing. The debate began with Paul Bloom's excellent editorial in Seed, in which he argued that "fMRI imagery has attained an undue influence, and we shouldn't be seduced."...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:27 AM • 15 Comments • 3 TrackBacks
June 27, 2006
Category: Neuroscience
Mixing Memory posted an interesting reply to my "Gladwell is the New Freud" post. He argued that my "Freud bashing was just wrong": For one, while Jonah attempts to criticize Gladwell for being too Freud-like in his discussion of the...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:50 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 26, 2006
Category: Neuroscience
It's in every neuroscience textbook: the kitten that never saw with stereoscopic vision, because Hubel and Weisel sutured one of its eyes shut during the "critical period" of brain development. The moral, at least as I was taught it, was...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 12:18 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Culture
According to the Wall Street Journal, DaimlerChrysler is going to announce this week that it is introducing the Smart car into the U.S. market. For those who don't know, the Smart car is an incredibly tiny line of cars that...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 8:58 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Culture
My post comparing Gladwell and Freud seemed to provoke a few defenses. Dave Munger over at Cognitive Daily offered a guarded defense of Gladwell, while Mixing Memory offered a defense of Freud. I'll respond to Cognitive Daily first. Here is...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 8:38 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Culture
Today's rumination on faith and fundamentalism by Edward Rothstein in the NY Times left me cold. In the process of reviewing Bill Moyer's new program on "religion and reason," Rothstein rejects the idea that fundamentalism, violence and religious faith are...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 8:20 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 24, 2006
Category: Neuroscience
This comment was in response to my earlier post which argued that researchers should try to discover the genetic causes of mental illness instead of trying to decipher intelligence. The commenter makes some excellent points, although I still believe that...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 8:45 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Culture
My next article for Seed will talk briefly about Toyota and some of the reasons for its astonishing success in one of the most competitive industries in the world. But I thought it was worth highlighting a quote from the...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 8:29 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 23, 2006
Sharon Begley has an interesting column today in the WSJ on the growing chorus of voices aiming to discredit string theory. String theory isn't any more wrong than preons, twistor theory, dynamical triangulations, or other physics fads. But in those...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 12:18 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Culture
The murmurs are growing louder...Will Al Gore be the first presidential candidate to launch a campaign based on a scientific issue? Here is Marty Peretz: The issues Gore has tended to are issues on which he is truly expert...He is...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 11:48 AM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: My So-Called Life
Considering that I've eaten my fair share of British beef (I lived in England for a few years, and had a soft spot for the hamburgers at my local gastropub), this study was not welcome news. Here is the NY...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:03 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 22, 2006
Category: Culture
The National Bureau of Economic Resarch just released a new study on peer effects in the classroom: The marginal effect of a one percent increase in the quality of peers on student achievement is equivalent to between 8−15% of a...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 5:19 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: My So-Called Life
Please forgive this post, but as the proud parent of a cockatiel with an inverted beak (a common birth defect), it has long upset me that there is very little information available on the web about birds with this "problem"....
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 11:10 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Neuroscience
In my post on Blink, I argued that Gladwell's book was a wee bit incoherent, and that this incoherence stemmed from his reliance on spiffy anecdotes instead of nitty-gritty scientific details. Katherine made an excellent comment: I thought the problem...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:46 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 21, 2006
Category: Culture
The Wall Street Journal just posted a very interesting list which analyzes all the known bird flu deaths so far. It makes for strangely engrossing reading....
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 4:26 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Culture
In the new The New Republic, Steven Pinker does a fair and thorough assesment of the recent study asserting that Ashkenazi Jews have a genetic advantage in intelligence. According to the researchers (Gregory Cochran, Jason Hardy, and Henry Harpending), this...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:50 AM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 20, 2006
Category: Culture
Like many people who know a bit about modern neuroscience, I was under-whelmed by Blink. It felt to me like a series of vivid anecdotes stiched together with some vague pop psychology. (For those who are interested in the adaptive...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 12:20 PM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 19, 2006
Category: Culture
PZ Myers dissects Ann Coulter's ridiculous claim that "There is no physical evidence for evolution" with his usual panache and wit. Of course, he is entirely right: Darwinian evolution is a sacrosant biological fact. Without the theory of evolution, life...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 2:55 PM • 8 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 16, 2006
Category: Neuroscience
The Wall Street Journal has a fascinating article on Bruce Lahn today. Last September, Lahn announced in Science that he had isolated two brain genes in humans which had undergone recent evolution, but only in certain populations. His paper contained...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:10 AM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 15, 2006
Category: Culture
As a writer, there are few nicer things than reading a lucid and thought provoking response to an article you've written. PZ Myers, in responding to my article on the controversial theories of Joan Roughgarden, has written a gem of...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 4:15 PM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
These kinds of articles annoy me, especially when they appear on the front page of The New York Times. Where to begin? Well, there is the utterly banal thesis, neatly summarized by Steven Pinker (in case you didn't want to...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:45 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 14, 2006
Category: My So-Called Life
As the proud owner of an African Grey Timneh who is preening herself on my shoulder right now, I thought my bird was adept at impersonations. Her name is Junebug (June to her friends), and she does a spot on...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 12:25 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Culture
One of my best friends just had his first kid. I'm almost 25, and there's something strange about seeing a person you usually associate with beer and baseball cradling his infant. It sets of all sorts of hormonal switches. Instead...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 11:10 AM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 12, 2006
Category: Neuroscience
I got a very thoughtful email from a former colleague of mine (he's still a neuroscientist), who wondered why I would invest in scientific research for drug addicts over those with mental illness.
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 12:10 PM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 10, 2006
Category: Culture
Sharon Begley of The Wall Street Journal is one of the finest science reporters around. Her Friday column was typically interesting.
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 12:39 PM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Neuroscience
This week's question is what scientific field I would study, "if time and money were not obstacles." Since I'm not a real scientist - just a science writer - I'm not quite sure how to answer this. I worked for several years in a neuroscience lab, and if I hadn't studied neuroscience I probably would have ended up trying to understand RNA.
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 9:10 AM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 8, 2006
Category: Culture
Apparently, homosexuality is a sensitive subject. Ever since Seed posted my article on Joan Roughgarden earlier this week, I've gotten numerous emails informing of all the reasons why I'm "scientifically wrong" and "morally repugnant."
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 4:10 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: My So-Called Life
Writing the first line of your first blog is even harder than starting to write a book.
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 3:09 PM • 9 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
