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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.
October 31, 2006
Category: Culture
So much for the body-brain duality. Researchers in the new PNAS claim that the sympathetic nervous system in depressed rodents causes a loss of bone mass. Treatment with anti-depressants rescues the situation. These results define a linkage among depression, excessive...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 1:43 PM • 15 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Culture
This survey gives me hope: 78 percent of Americans support medical marijuana: When Californians approved one of the first medical marijuana laws, in 1996, drug warriors were so convinced it would lead to a catastrophic spike in illegal use by...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 11:18 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Culture
Last week, I mentioned that the Royal Institution in London had come up with short list of the best science books of all time. After some excellent feedback from readers, and because I love making lists of my favorite things...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 11:12 AM • 13 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Culture
There's an odd article in the NY Times today on Marc Hauser's hypothesis that the human mind contains a "moral grammar," somewhat akin to a Chomskyan linguistic grammar. The article is odd because, while it acknowledges that Hauser's idea is...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:45 AM • 30 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Culture
Sometimes, it seems as if science reporters just decide to make something a big story, even if there's no new news to report. In the last week, the link between calorie reduction and increased lifespan has been everywhere. New York...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:03 AM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
October 30, 2006
Category: Culture
Men are getting less manly: our testosterone levels continue to decline. Given the Hobbesian state of the world, that might not be a bad thing. (Unfortunately, falling testosterone levels have negative medical consequences. So world peace might require a reduction...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 12:34 PM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Culture
I'm like a broken record, but if I could implement one policy change right away it would be to raise the gas tax: See the full image over at Foreign Policy. The latest people to support a phased increase in...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:51 AM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Culture
If the polls are accurate, Senator Rick Santorum is about to lose his re-election bid. That's a good thing. Santorum is a bad cliche of the culture wars, a powerful politician who actually believes that the earth is 6,000 years...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 7:56 AM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
October 27, 2006
Category: Culture
What would happen if you combined Bob Dylan's greatest hits with the choreography of Twyla Tharp? It turns out that you get something truly awful, an alchemical concotion that is both surreal and boring. Here's Ben Brantley: And now for...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 8:50 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Culture
Richard Dawkins has been everywhere lately. Dawkins is even keeping an online journal while on his book tour. It's full of amusing, if slightly mean-spirited, vignettes like this: The large hall at Randolph Macon Woman's College was packed. I gave...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 7:12 AM • 10 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
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