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Jonah Lehrer is a contributing editor at Wired. He's also written for The New Yorker, Seed, Nature, the Boston Globe and is a contributor to Radio Lab. He's the author of Proust Was A Neuroscientist. His new book is How We Decide.
September 30, 2006
Category: Culture
Sometimes I'm amazed at the pockets of ignorance lurking in our midst. This is the sad story of a Texas art teacher who got suspended for taking her class to the museum. Her crime? Letting her innocent pupils glimpse some...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 11:33 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
September 29, 2006
Category: Culture
It's Michael Kinsley day here at the Frontal Cortex. Over at the Guardian, Kinsley has another stupendous piece lamenting the sharp division that American newspapers (especially the NY Times) try to draw between fact and opinion. According to a column...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 2:46 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Culture
No, I'm not talking crystal meth, and that much hyped syndrome, methmouth. I'm talking about your cholesterol medication, or your blood pressure pills, or your Prozac. From Steven Dubner: Dr. Reiss [Dubner's dentist] told me that tooth decay in general,...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 11:08 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Culture
It's not particularly difficult to expose the incoherence of current Republican policy. But few do it with the wit and brio of Michael Kinsley: It was, I believe, Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) who first made the excellent, bitter and terribly...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:48 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Culture
It's one of the grandest experiments in American democracy since the invention of the paper ballot, and nobody seems to care. Many municipalities are now moving towards electronic voting, and the results are starting to trickle in. So far, things...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:20 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
September 28, 2006
Category: Neuroscience
Special K - active ingredient ketamine - is an illegal club drug that was originally used as a medical anesthetic. But now scientists are reporting that it might be a useful ally in the fight against depression: Researchers at the...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 2:40 PM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
When it comes to stocks, ticker symbols seem to be extremely important. Instead of evaluating a company's financial fundamentals, investors get seduced by cute abbreviations. As the WSJ notes: For at least two years, Harley-Davidson Inc.'s investor-relations folks had thought...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 12:11 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Neuroscience
I'm fascinated by the fashions of mental illness. Every few decades, there is an epidemic of a new brain affliction, while an old disease quietly fades away. Mother's Little Helper (aka Valium) is replaced by the polite contentment of SSRI's....
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 11:10 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: My So-Called Life
Sorry for the absence. I was giving a talk in NYC, where I had the pleasure of meeting PZ, Chris Mooney and Lisa Randall. (I was talking about how Walt Whitman anticipated the neuroscience of today.) I also had the...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:10 AM • 9 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
September 25, 2006
Category: Neuroscience
Go to Yale for free. Yale University said on Wednesday it will offer digital videos of some courses on the Internet for free, along with transcripts in several languages, in an effort to make the elite private school more accessible....
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:55 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Highly Allochthonous 11.05.2009
Eruptions 11.05.2009
Not Exactly Rocket Science 11.05.2009
Corpus Callosum 11.05.2009
Starts With a Bang 11.04.2009
