Jonah Lehrer is an editor at large for Seed Magazine. His first book is Proust Was A Neuroscientist. Buy it here.
April 30, 2007
Category: Culture
So here's a link to my future book (due out in November), which gives you a nice little synopsis of the subject. What do you think of the cover?* *I'm personally interested in whether or not most people recognize the...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 11:46 AM • 13 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Culture
Why we need more geriatric specialists
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:10 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 29, 2007
Category: Neuroscience
I've got an article in the Boston Globe Ideas section today on the cognitive revolution, and recent research demonstrating the relationship between cognition and emotion. Ever since Plato, scholars have drawn a clear distinction between thinking and feeling. Cognitive psychology...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 12:00 PM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 26, 2007
Category: Culture
Alison Gopnik has written a thoroughly entertaining takedown of the mirror-neuron hype: The myth of mirror neurons may not do much harm. Perhaps it's even good for science that in the 21st century we turn to the brain, rather than...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 7:37 PM • 8 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Neuroscience
Mike Penner, a sports writer for the LA Times, has decided to become a woman. He will return to the paper as Christine Daniels. He wrote a gripping personal reflection for the paper explaining his decision: Transsexualism is a complicated...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 11:37 AM • 10 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Culture
Christof Koch makes a compelling argument: My empirical studies into the neurobiology of consciousness have convinced me that many species share the sights and sounds of life with us humans. Why? First, except for size, there are no large-scale, dramatic...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:15 AM • 16 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 25, 2007
Category: Neuroscience
Does football cause brain damage?
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 1:20 PM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Culture
Why the middle class feels so squeezed.
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 9:49 AM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 24, 2007
Category: Culture
Take note historians of the future. When you set out to write your tome, The Rise and Fall of the American Empire, you might find the following three stories, all of them appearing in today's New York Times, to be...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 11:17 AM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Culture
Not all wags mean the same thing. Careful analysis reveals an emotional difference between wags to the right and wags to the left. This asymmetry reflects an underlying asymmetry built into the mammalian brain: When dogs feel fundamentally positive about...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 9:18 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 20, 2007
Category: Culture
Failure is always an option. When we pretend that it isn't we are simply indulging our irrational aversion for losses.
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 3:44 PM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 19, 2007
Category: Culture
Success in the marketplace isn't necessarily correlated with quality.
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 9:44 PM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Culture
The diesel engine is a testament to the benefits of governmental regulation.
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 11:49 AM • 10 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 18, 2007
Category: Culture
Just one, at least according to the latest scientific research.
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:12 AM • 16 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 17, 2007
Category: Culture
Did failing eyesight lead to the abstraction of impressionism?
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 12:06 PM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 16, 2007
Category: Culture
Young people embrace evolution.
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 1:25 PM • 32 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Culture
A fascinating case of collective hysteria.
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 11:14 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 13, 2007
Category: Neuroscience
Mother Theresa was right: "If I look at the mass I will never act. If I look at the one, I will."
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:33 AM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 12, 2007
Category: Neuroscience
Does the brain have a type of memory dedicated just to people?
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 11:35 AM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 10, 2007
Category: Culture
We need more oyster farms.
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 8:42 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 8, 2007
Category: Neuroscience
Can neuroscience discover the cellular correlate of utility?
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 6:50 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 6, 2007
Matsuzaka is one of the few pitchers who really uses psychology to his benefit.
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 1:08 PM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 5, 2007
Category: Neuroscience
Marginal utility can be measured. According to new research out of Wolfram Schultz's lab, poor people are much quicker learners than rich people when playing a Pavlovian paradigm for small amounts of money. (Poor people took about 12 trials to...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 12:39 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Neuroscience
Is the distinction between brain and behavior obsolete?
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 12:20 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 4, 2007
Category: Culture
The pernicious effects of confirmation bias.
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 4:41 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Neuroscience
Powerful people are more likely to treat other people unfairly.
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:44 AM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 3, 2007
Category: Neuroscience
A recent study in The Archives of General Psychiatry suggests that 25 percent of all Americans diagnosed with depression are actually just dealing with the normal disappointments of life, like divorce or the loss of a job. Their sadness is...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 4:10 PM • 10 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Culture
We are so obsessed with the worst case scenario that we don't even consider the hassle caused by our attempts to avoid the worse case scenario.
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:39 AM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 2, 2007
Category: Culture
Why do we remember shards of poetry when we can't remember anything else? After Tom Chaffin's brain tumor was removed, he temporarily lost the ability to speak in coherent sentences. (He also lost the ability to move the right side...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 12:57 PM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Neuroscience
My unconscious knew what would happen before I did.
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 12:43 PM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
