Jonah Lehrer is an editor at large for Seed Magazine. His first book is Proust Was A Neuroscientist. Buy it here.
January 31, 2007
Category: Culture
Over at Slate, Gregg Easterbrook argues that the President's recent proposal to increase the Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standard by 4 percent a year is a brilliant and bold policy that will "reverse [oil] consumption trends". He blames the...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:04 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Neuroscience
The epic battle between video game consoles seems to have a clear winner: the Nintendo Wii. The Wii, which uses an innovative wireless controller to translate the players' motions onto the screen, has upset the order of the video game...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 9:09 AM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
January 30, 2007
Category: Culture
In the 2004 documentary Super Size Me, Morgan Spurlock decided to eat nothing but McDonald's for 30 days. He ended up gaining lots of weight, suffering liver damage, and enduring intense mood swings. But now Spurlock's movie has been repeated...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:36 AM • 9 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Culture
For some reason, I find the death of Barbaro rather upsetting. The first two horse races I've ever watched on television were his victory at the Kentucky Derby and his injury at the Preakness. I've since followed his medical travails...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:28 AM • 9 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
January 29, 2007
Category: Culture
There's a new collection of Einstein's personal letters that are about to be published. They give us a portrait of the young scientist before he revolutionized science. At the time these letters were written, Einstein was insecure, poor and struggling...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:59 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Neuroscience
Paul Krugman's analysis of Milton Friedman's intellectual legacy is one of the best articles I've read recently. Krugman not only paints a balanced portrait of Friedman's accomplishments - great economist, bad popularizer - but ably summarizes the rival tensions in...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 9:51 AM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
January 27, 2007
Category: Culture
It almost seems as if the faddish claims of nutritional science have an inverse relationship with reality. If a nutrient is supposed to be good for us, chances are that later research will contradict the claim. Here's Michael Pollan in...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 9:49 AM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
January 26, 2007
Category: Neuroscience
It's an astonishingly robust finding: Smokers with damaged insulas were 136 times more likely to have their addictions erased than smokers with damage in other parts of their brains. What makes this paper so interesting is that it actually makes...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:25 AM • 8 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
January 24, 2007
Category: Culture
Or just a mix-up with the cable feed? Hat Tip: Kottke...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 2:02 PM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Neuroscience
Is the Hard Problem of consciousness solvable by science? Will we ever come up with a meaningful explanation as to how squirts of neurotransmitter and minor jolts of electricity create subjective experience? As far as I'm concerned, this is the...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 1:38 PM • 18 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
January 23, 2007
Category: Culture
Is this true? Are neuroscientists really the cool kids? If so, then what is the "coolest" avenue of neuroscience research? (And please don't say consciousness studies.) Q. Among biologists, is sperm research very respected? A. Well, in biology, all the...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:37 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Neuroscience
For most of the 20th century, neuroscience treated our memories like inert packets of information. They were created through Pavlovian reinforcement, and then just shelved away in the brain, like dusty old books in a library. While this approach led...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:33 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
January 22, 2007
Category: Culture
This is an important medical story about the spread of a drug-resistant strain of bacteria called Acinetobacter baumannii. The spread of this superbug - it's known as an opportunistic pathogen, since it preys on the old, young and weak -...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:32 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Culture
Last night's Colts-Patriots game was a painful experience. (As you probably guessed, I'm a Patriots fan.) But it wasn't just painful because the Pats lost the game: it was how they lost the game. The Pats dominated the 1st half,...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:27 AM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
January 19, 2007
From Steven Shapin's recent New Yorker article on the history of vegetarianism: A recent report by the U.N.'s Food and Agriculture Organization reckons that at least eighteen per cent of the global-warming effect comes from livestock, more than is caused...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 12:42 PM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Culture
In the past two years, we've been blessed with two remarkable novels about neuroscience and the brain: The Echo Maker, by Richard Powers, and Saturday, by Ian McEwan. Personally, I thought Saturday was the more perfect work, although both books...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:22 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
January 18, 2007
Category: Culture
I've got good news and bad news. I'll give you the good news first: A cheap and simple drug that kills almost all cancers by switching off their "immortality". The drug, dichloroacetate (DCA), has already been used for years to...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 3:55 PM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Culture
People who have near-death experiences often report a similar set of symptoms: they levitate above their body while being slowly pulled towards a bright white light. Nevertheless, the details of this experience - the particular afterlife that lies beyond the...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 12:23 PM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Culture
Good news: cancer deaths have declined for the second year in a row. This trend has a number of causes, including fewer smokers and improved treatment options. But one cancer accounts for more than 65 percent of the overall decline...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:45 AM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
January 17, 2007
Category: Neuroscience
I'm always startled by the sheer variety of toothpastes being sold at my local drug store. It's a classic example of excessive choice: all those different products, most of which seem interchangeable, actually make me less likely to buy anything....
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 11:49 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Culture
Here is the most depressing lede of the day: $1.2 trillion would pay for an unprecedented public health campaign -- a doubling of cancer research funding, treatment for every American whose diabetes or heart disease is now going unmanaged and...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:26 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
January 16, 2007
Category: Neuroscience
What is the neural correlate of the self? The easy answer is that nobody knows. We have yet to discover a neurological patient who has lost their sense of identity, but still retained their conscious sensations. Nevertheless, certain brain areas...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 12:15 PM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Neuroscience
John Tierney inaugurates his new Science Times column with a charming mediation on a recent neuroeconomics paper published in Neuron: The economists teamed with psychologists at Stanford to turn an M.R.I. machine into a shopping mall. They gave each experimental...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:46 AM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
January 15, 2007
Category: Culture
Having children is bad for your health: A pair of researchers, drawing on the experience of nearly 22,000 couples in the 19th century -- has measured the "fitness cost" of human reproduction. This is the price that parents pay in...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 2:20 PM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Culture
Agricultural subsidies are bad policy on so many different levels. They artificially lower food prices, thus making it harder for farmers from developing nations to compete. (Cutting subsidies would do a tremendous amount of good for the third world.) They...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:19 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
January 13, 2007
Category: Culture
Is the mathematical avant-garde getting so abstruse that it stretches the limits of the human mind? Is it dangerous when a science becomes entirely dependent upon the calculations of computers? Here's Sharon Begley in the WSJ: Mathematicians have become increasingly...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 8:39 AM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
January 11, 2007
Category: Culture
So I was talking to a friend of mine, currently working towards his Ph.D in neuroscience, and we got into an interesting discussion about the most influential neuroscience book published in the last 25 years. We defined "influence" as broadly...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 8:56 AM • 10 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
January 10, 2007
Category: Culture
PZ has a great post on a recent Nature Genetics paper that explores the startling connection between longevity and luck. (Or, as scientists like to stay, stochasticity). It turns out that genetically identical worms survive for very different amounts of...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 2:51 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Culture
I'm curious how animal rights activists feel about this: They are the new "Prozac Nation": cats, dogs, birds, horses and an assortment of zoo animals whose behavior has been changed, whose anxieties and fears have been quelled and whose owners'...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 12:34 PM • 8 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
January 9, 2007
Category: Culture
Last week, gay-rights activists led a protest against research being done on sheep at Oregon State University. Andrew Sullivan reports: The researchers have been adjusting various hormones in the brains of gay rams to try to see if they can...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 8:04 PM • 8 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Culture
According to a new study published in the BMJ, the Danish are happier than people in other developed nations because they have low expectations. That's the dismal secret of happiness: not expecting very much from life in the first place....
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:05 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
January 8, 2007
Category: Culture
In his latest New Yorker article (an otherwise problematic discussion of Enron), Malcolm Gladwell makes an interesting distinction between "puzzles" and "mysteries": Osama bin Laden's whereabouts are a puzzle. We can't find him because we don't have enough information. The...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:59 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Neuroscience
I've always thought that most reality television was nothing more than unethical psychological experiments in disguise. (What else could Temptation Island or Wife Swap possibly be?) But now ABC has taken this idea to its logical extreme. Last week, the...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:25 AM • 8 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
January 5, 2007
Category: Culture
According to The Washington Post, public libraries are tossing little-read classics so that they can make more room on their shelves for popular best-sellers. I think this is a good thing. Public libraries exist so that people can read books...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 11:04 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Culture
Every time history repeats itself, the price goes up: Foreshadowing potential climate chaos to come, early global warming caused unexpectedly severe and erratic temperature swings as rising levels of greenhouse gases helped transform Earth, a team led by researchers at...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 9:57 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
January 3, 2007
Category: Culture
Daniel Kahneman and Jonathan Renshon have a great article in the new Foreign Policy magazine on "Why Hawks Win." They describe some of the mental biases discovered by Prospect Theory, and explain how these biases affect our foreign policy decisions....
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 3:59 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Culture
From Dan Neil, the wittiest writer in the newspaper business: Desire, the Buddha informs us, is the root of all suffering -- also, a leading cause of alimony, but let's move on. The craving for comfort, luxury, prestige and me-first...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 11:20 AM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
January 2, 2007
Category: Culture
Since I spend most of my disposable income on Amazon, I found this article on their pricing strategy somewhat disturbing: Imagine this: You go to a bookstore, browse, choose a couple of volumes. But you don't want to carry the...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:57 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Neuroscience
There was a nice article in The Times on Sunday about the research of Daniel Levitin, a neuroscientist at McGill (and former record producer) who studies the neural substrate of music: Observing 13 subjects who listened to classical music while...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:54 AM • 10 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
