Iran and the Risk Premium
Category: Culture
Why the threat of war is profitable for Iran.
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:27 AM • 9 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
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Profile
Jonah Lehrer is an editor at large for Seed Magazine. His first book is Proust Was A Neuroscientist. Buy it here.
Recent Posts
- Understanding Tragedy
- GPS Sucks
- Plane Reading
- Mind Control by Cell Phone
- Hippy-Crites
- DNA Evidence
- Brain Fitness Programs
- Locked-In Syndrome
- Horse Racing
- Literature, Psychology and the Elites
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Blogs I've Recently Enjoyed
March 30, 2007
March 29, 2007
Whale Sharks in Captivity
Category: Culture
If you put a whale shark in an aquarium, it's a death sentence.
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 11:18 AM • 16 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Bush is a Hedgehog
Category: Culture
The problem with Bush's thought process.
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:42 AM • 8 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
March 28, 2007
David Sedaris and Imaginary Memories
Category: Neuroscience
Why we shouldn't trust our memories.
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:43 AM • 8 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
March 27, 2007
The Surprises of Cardiology
Category: Culture
It was a day of unexpected findings for the field of cardiology. First, there was the news that patients with stents did not have a longer life span or a reduced number of heart attacks compared to patients treated with...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:30 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
March 26, 2007
Physical Theories as Women
Category: Culture
This is the funniest thing I've read today. Over at McSweeney's, Simon Dedeo compares our physical theories to types of women: 0. Newtonian gravity is your high-school girlfriend. As your first encounter with physics, she's amazing. You will never forget...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 4:27 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Medical Salaries
Category: Culture
High salaries come with high expectations.
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 12:39 PM • 10 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
March 23, 2007
Attention, Sensation and Mystery
Category: Neuroscience
Do banal terms like "executive control" or "top-down processing" hide a deeper mystery?
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:27 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
March 22, 2007
Morality, Psychopaths and Emotions
Category: Neuroscience
More evidence on the crucial importance of emotion when making moral decisions.
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:30 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
March 21, 2007
Don't Waste Good Wine on Food
Category: Culture
I used to work in a restaurant where we served wild salmon with a Barolo sauce. (This was back when drinking red wine with fish was still very au courant.) Needless to say, the chef wasn't wasting real Barolo on...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 12:05 PM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Prison and Mental Illness
Category: Neuroscience
Here are your disturbing prison facts for the day: Percentage of American adults held in either prison or mental institutions in 1953 and today, respectively: 0.67, 0.68 Percentage of these adults in 1953 who were in mental institutions: 75 Percentage...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:58 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
March 20, 2007
Birds Acting Human
Category: Neuroscience
t's hard to believe that just over fifty years ago psychology was in the firm grip of behaviorism.
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 12:36 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
The Smart Car Comes to America
Category: Culture
The Smart car gets 60 mpg and starts at $12,000.
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 12:10 PM • 8 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
March 19, 2007
Can Exercise Make You Smarter?
Category: Neuroscience
Descartes is turning over in his grave: the mind and body grow more intertwined by the day. It's becoming clear that maintaining a healthy mind into old age isn't simply a matter of keeping the brain active with card games...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 12:49 PM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Morality and War
The violence of war violates our most basic moral instincts.
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:50 AM • 20 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
March 18, 2007
Huntington's and Genetic Testing
Category: Culture
This is an unbelievably poignant story about what it's like to learn that your nervous system is fated to self-destruct. Katherine Moser, a 25 year old occupational therapist, decided to take a genetic test that would tell her whether she...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 4:45 PM • 11 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
March 16, 2007
Happiness, Wealth and the Amish
Category: Neuroscience
The 20th century was the American century, but we got progressively less happy as the years rolled along: The authors also find that over the last century, Americans, both men and women, have gotten steadily--and hugely--less happy. The difference in...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:30 AM • 13 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Combining Foods
Category: My So-Called Life
An excellent philosophical time-waster.
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:09 AM • 8 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
March 15, 2007
Quantum Consciousness
Category: Neuroscience
Why bad theories of consciousness won't disappear.
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 11:43 AM • 9 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Neuroscience and Science Writing
Category: My So-Called Life
Why some writerly inaccuracies are necessary.
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:59 AM • 18 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
March 14, 2007
Helping Farm Animals
Category: Culture
Chris Shays (R-CT) has introduced an important piece of legislation. It's called The Farm Animal Stewardship Purchasing Act, and it would set basic humanitarian standards for any farm trying to sell meat to the federal government. Humane treatment would be...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 3:44 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Will Wright
Category: Culture
It's odd that one of the most insightful thinkers in our culture designs computer games.
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 12:39 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Physics, Neuroscience and Mystery
Category: Culture
What's the biggest philosophical difference between neuroscientists and physicists?
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 11:55 AM • 8 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
March 13, 2007
Spindle Cells and Humor
Category: Neuroscience
Mirror neurons get all the glory, but I think spindle cells just might be even cooler.
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 3:19 PM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
The Centrism of Generation Next
Category: Culture
I'm pleased with my generation: Young Americans, it turns out, are unexpectedly conservative on abortion but notably liberal on gay marriage. Given that 18- to 25-year-olds are the le ast Republican generation (35 percent) and less religious than their elders...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:42 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Self-Control is a Muscle
Category: Culture
Mental exertion can decrease our ability to control ourselves.
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:12 AM • 14 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
March 12, 2007
Predicting the NCAA Tournament
Category: Culture
Now that the NCAA basketball tournament brackets have been announced, it's worth reminding ourselves not to bet too much money on our (overconfident) predictions. Why not? Because the tournament is impossible to predict. That, at least, was the conclusion of...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:19 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
March 9, 2007
Dreaming, Smelling and Memory
Category: Neuroscience
After Freud lost his scientific credibility, psychology became very dismissive of dreams. The leading scientific theory held that dreams consisted of mental detritus, the scraps and fragments of memories that your brain didn't want to remember. While Freud mined our...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:49 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
March 8, 2007
A Bug on the Windshield
Category: Culture
A close-up view of a bug splattered on the windshield.
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 11:42 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
A Science of Medical Performance
Category: Culture
What we need is a new branch of psychology: the science of medical performance.
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 11:20 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Does the Brain Care About the Truth?
Category: Neuroscience
Why is there no neural correlate for the "truth"?
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:45 AM • 11 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
March 7, 2007
Murder and Medicine
Category: Culture
I'm a junkie for medical stories. You give me a good narrative description of a mysterious set of symptoms, and I'm hooked. If you share my obsession with patient histories and diagnostic case-studies, then I highly recommend Complications, by Atul...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 3:09 PM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Taking Trans Fats Too Far
Category: Culture
This is getting ridiculous: Matthew Reich is a baker dedicated to natural ingredients. He prefers butter in the cookies and brioche he turns out at Tom Cat Bakery in Long Island City, Queens, and like many professional cooks he applauds...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:49 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
March 5, 2007
Whitman and Neuroscience
Category: My So-Called Life
Walt Whitman anticipated some of the basic facts of modern neuroscience.
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 7:55 PM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Spiders Like Meat
Category: Culture
Here's your crazy factoid of the day. It's from the recent article on spider hunters in the New Yorker by Burkhard Bilger (not online): Spiders kill at an astonishing pace. One Dutch researcher estimates that there are some five trillion...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:49 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Evolution, Agency, God and Morality
Category: Culture
What God and morality have in common.
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:45 AM • 12 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
March 2, 2007
The Evolution of Spice
Category: Neuroscience
Why spicy food tastes hot, and capsaicin evolved in chili peppers.
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 12:43 PM • 9 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
The Benefits of Loss Aversion
Category: Culture
Bad things happen when we stop fearing losses.
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 9:48 AM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
March 1, 2007
Unpatriotic Christians
Category: Culture
42 percent of Christian Americans are Christians before they are Americans.
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 2:49 PM • 13 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Why Don't Rich People Give Away More Money?
Category: Neuroscience
Some people are really, really rich: Take Oracle's founder, Lawrence J. Ellison. Mr. Ellison's net worth last year was around $16 billion. And it will probably be much bigger when the list comes out in a few weeks. With $16...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 12:49 PM • 45 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Drug Companies Doing Good
Category: Culture
A new malaria pill hits the market.
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 9:11 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Education and Emotion
Category: Neuroscience
David Brooks argues that our educational system is failing to educate our emotions.
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 8:55 AM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
