Jonah Lehrer is an editor at large for Seed Magazine. His first book is Proust Was A Neuroscientist. Buy it here.
May 31, 2007
Category: Culture
The physicist David Ruelle gives a convincing demonstration that suspending the gravitational effect on our atmosphere of one electron at the limit of the observable universe would take no more than two weeks to make a difference in Earth's weather...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 1:25 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
May 30, 2007
Category: Culture
So there's an interesting debate over at TPM Cafe about this article in the Nation, which argues that neoclassical economics (the mainstream) suppresses its heterodox alternatives. If true, this would be a classic case of a Kuhnian paradigm, in which...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 12:32 PM • 10 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Culture
Lou Dobbs has repeatedly asserted on his CNN show that there have been 7,000 cases of leprosy in the US over the previous three years. If true, that statistic would represent a stunning increase. Dobbs' insinuation, of course, was that...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:39 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
May 29, 2007
Category: Neuroscience
David Brooks uses neuroscience to criticize Al Gore's latest book: [Gore's argument] grows out of a bizarre view of human nature. Gore seems to have come up with a theory that the upper, logical mind sits on top of, and...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 11:39 AM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Culture
Here's a great L.A. Times editorial on the various policy options that we can use to combat climate change. The editorial comes out firmly against regulation (simply ordering polluters to clean up), and mounts a reasoned criticism of cap-and-trade schemes...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 11:15 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
May 27, 2007
Category: Neuroscience
It works. Dick Cheney shows how to do it: These are events [9/11] we can never forget. And they are scenes the enemy would like to see played out in this country over and over again, on a larger and...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 2:51 PM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
May 25, 2007
Category: Neuroscience
The importance of investing in pre-K education
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:24 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
May 24, 2007
Category: Culture
We are surprisingly bad at it: Although last year was quieter than anticipated and the storms of 2005 caused the Weather Service to raise its prediction, the number of tropical storms predicted in May was within the expected range in...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:41 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Culture
So the Yankees aren't quite as bad as we've been led to believe. (At least, until Petite also pulls his hamstring.) They've taken two of the last three from the Red Sox. That said, it's still obvious that the Yankees...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:23 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
May 22, 2007
Category: Neuroscience
From the March 31 issue of The Lancet: The ease of getting to sleep and staying asleep depends not only on previous wake time, but also on associations with the circadian rhythm of core temperature. Sleep is easiest to initiate...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 9:55 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
May 20, 2007
Category: Culture
Americans consume more than 9 billion broiler chickens every year.
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 5:55 PM • 12 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
May 18, 2007
Category: Culture
I've got an article in New Scientist on changing scientific perceptions of synesthesia, and how synesthetic experiences are helping scientists understand how language is processed inside the brain. The article is behind a subscription wall, but here's the link: For...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 5:27 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Culture
At first glance, it sounds like a cheesy third-culture gimmick: UCLA molecular biologists have turned protein sequences into original compositions of classical music. "We converted the sequence of proteins into music and can get an auditory signal for every protein,"...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:15 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
May 17, 2007
Help Hillary pick her campaign song. The music fan in me would vote for U2's "City of Blinding Lights" or The Staple Singers "I'll Take You There". The political strategist in me would vote for The Dixie Chicks "Ready to...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:45 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Culture
It's not the usual version of love at first sight: it's much better. Elizabeth Fitzsimons was adopting a Chinese baby. The girl was a year old, but she already suffered from a long list of medical ailments. She'd had a...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:27 AM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
May 16, 2007
Category: Neuroscience
David Leonhardt has an interesting column on the importance of using subtle environmental cues - Leonhardt calls them "nudges" - to encourage good decision-making. He begins with a fascinating anecdote about patients in hospital beds: For more than a decade,...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 2:16 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Culture
The Smart car is here.
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 9:57 AM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
May 15, 2007
Category: Culture
Anthony Gottlieb has an excellent review of several recent books on atheism in the New Yorker. I especially enjoyed his comparison of David Hume and some of the more polemical atheists currently atop the bestseller lists: In 1779, a year...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 2:47 PM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Culture
The Pope gets his causality backwards.
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:28 AM • 10 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
May 11, 2007
Category: Culture
One day, I want to compile a collection of all the metaphors that have shaped modern science. The sciences of the mind, perhaps because we know so little about the mind, have been particularly vulnerable to the lure of facile...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 2:28 PM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
May 10, 2007
Do you eat your favorite foods first?
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 9:08 AM • 14 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
May 9, 2007
Category: Culture
Yesterday, Massachusetts announced a massive new stem cell research program, which amounts to more than $1 billion dollars in new funding. The grants are good, but I'm most excited by Governor Patrick's proposal for a stem cell bank, the first...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 9:44 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
May 8, 2007
Category: Culture
Obama talks tough to Detroit, but still supports the tariff on sugar ethanol.
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:59 AM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
May 7, 2007
Category: Culture
Is terroir a scientific myth?
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:39 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
May 4, 2007
Category: Culture
What every writer can learn from Darwin.
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:28 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
May 3, 2007
Category: Culture
Bad eyewitness identifications contributed to 75 percent of wrongful convictions in cases that were overturned by DNA evidence.
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:20 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
May 2, 2007
Category: Culture
The absence of a rat mother during a critical period of pup development permanently alters the behavior of the pup.
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:34 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
May 1, 2007
Category: Neuroscience
Score another one for unconscious processing, which is especially prevalent during sleep. A new study in PNAS suggests that, as people sleep, their brains are forming relational memories, which require "the flexible ability to generalize across existing stores of information"....
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 9:59 AM • 24 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
