Jonah Lehrer is an editor at large for Seed Magazine. His first book is Proust Was A Neuroscientist. Buy it here.
June 29, 2007
Category: Culture
A comic discussion on the origins of life, the moral status of sperm, abortion and a few other not-safe-for-work topics. (It's a deleted scene from Knocked Up, which everybody should see, right after they see Ratatouille.) Judd Apatow, by the...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:26 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Culture
Are cities like biological organisms?
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:18 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 28, 2007
Category: Culture
The stunning glass flowers at Harvard's Museum of Natural History.
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 11:59 AM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Culture
This interview with the novelist from The Believer is a few months old, but it's well worth a read: Something truly interesting is happening in many basic sciences, a real revolution in human knowing. For a long time--centuries--empiricism has tried...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:17 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 27, 2007
Category: Culture
An intriguing hypothesis: Gopnik argues that babies are not only conscious, they are more conscious than adults. Her argument for this view begins with the idea that people in general -- adults, that is -- have more conscious experience of...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:30 AM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Neuroscience
Selective brain damage makes us more rational investors.
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:23 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 26, 2007
Category: Culture
According to a new study, conservative Muslim dress codes might be causing serious health problems for Muslim women: In certain Middle Eastern and other countries where conservative dress curtails exposure to sunlight, high levels of vitamin D supplementation may be...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 2:36 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Culture
I've discovered my new favorite example of artists and scientists working together. It features Cecil Balmond, an engineer for Arup, and Anish Kapoor, the Turner-Prize winning sculptor. They collaborated on Marsyas, the spectacular 2003 installation inside the Tate Modern. David...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:32 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 22, 2007
Category: Culture
David Brooks makes a good point: A little while ago, a national study authorized by Congress found that abstinence education programs don't work. That gave liberals a chance to feel superior because it turns out that preaching traditional morality to...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 11:59 AM • 19 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 21, 2007
Category: Culture
This is what happens when a wine critic decides to scientifically test his sense of taste: She first handed me a cotton swab and instructed me to rub it vigorously against the inside of one of my cheeks. This was...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 11:35 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 20, 2007
Category: Culture
Too much choice can be bad.
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 12:13 PM • 8 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 19, 2007
Category: Culture
n+1 nails an important psychological aspect of blogs: Imagine a grandfather clock that strikes at random intervals. You can't tell time by it and yet you begin to live in constant anticipation of the next random chime. Pavlov was there...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 12:27 PM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Culture
It was one of those unquestioned rituals of childhood: after getting a little scrape or cut (generally in the knee or elbow area), your mother dutifully applies some hydrogen peroxide to the injury. The peroxide burns, but the pain is...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:19 AM • 9 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 18, 2007
Category: Culture
Another heartbreaking tale of improper medical care for veterans from The Washington Post. This time, the article is about the lack of mental health care for mentally troubled veterans, especially when it comes to Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). While the...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 9:46 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 15, 2007
Category: Culture
I'm a fan of both Dennett and Rorty*, and I thought this touching anecdote from Dennett really captures a crucial difference between the two philosophers: At one three-hour lunch in a fine restaurant in Buenos Aires, we [Dennett and Rorty]...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 4:37 PM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Neuroscience
Given recent inane comments about the immateriality of altruism by a certain neurosurgeon, I thought this recent article on the neural underpinnings of "pure altruism" might be of interest: You don't need to donate to charity to feel all warm...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 11:40 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Culture
Why rising inequality won't destroy capitalism, and why we easily ignore injustice.
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 11:21 AM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 14, 2007
Category: Culture
Imagine you are a doctor, and a patient comes into your office with a serious case of back pain. You begin by performing all the standard diagnostic tests, including an MRI and X-ray. Then, you perform an extensive interview. You...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 1:45 PM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Culture
If people were rational creatures, you might expect them to respond to rising gas prices by doing less solitary commuting. The cost of filling up the tank would provide an incentive to either carpool or use a heavily subsidized mass...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:12 AM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 13, 2007
Category: Culture
Felice Frankel is a model of consilience: When people call Felice Frankel an artist, she winces. In the first place, the photographs she makes don't sell. She knows this, she says, because after she received a Guggenheim grant in 1995,...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:25 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Culture
A radio show on the unreliability of memory.
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:03 AM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 12, 2007
Category: Culture
So everybody is talking about the Sopranos. I might as well weigh in. Personally, I thought the ambiguous ending was pretty brilliant. The Sopranos is always being compared to literature, but the engineered vagueness of that final scene is perhaps...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 2:13 PM • 9 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Culture
Siblings matter more than mothers.
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:18 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 11, 2007
Category: Culture
What Rorty got right about science.
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:38 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 8, 2007
Category: Culture
I discuss the neuroscientific sensitivities of Saturday, Ian McEwan's 2004 novel, in my forthcoming book, so I was happy to read this paragraph in Jonathan Lethem's review of McEwan's latest novel. Lethem is wondering why McEwan, despite his dabbles in...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 11:14 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Culture
David Leonhardt makes a good point. Controlling health care costs - one of our most important domestic policy problems - will require our politicians to make hard (and unpopular) decisions. In Idaho Falls, Idaho, anyone suffering from the sort of...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:49 AM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 7, 2007
Category: Culture
Reductionism is seductive, especially when it comes attached with a nifty sounding brain region: Explanations of psychological phenomena seem to generate more public interest when they contain neuroscientific information. Even irrelevant neuroscience information in an explanation of a psychological phenomenon...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 1:13 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Neuroscience
And a Borges short story.
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:13 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 6, 2007
Category: Culture
Fidgeting is genetic and it makes us skinnier.
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 4:34 PM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Culture
Wallace Stevens was right: Reality is a product of the most august imagination
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:57 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 5, 2007
Category: Culture
There's something unbearably poignant about scientific discoveries that delineate the limitations of science. Dennis Overbye explains: Our successors, whoever and wherever they are, may have no way of finding out about the Big Bang and the expanding universe, according to...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:15 AM • 10 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 4, 2007
Category: Neuroscience
The neural source of partisanship.
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 4:59 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Culture
The new season of Radio Lab has begun. For those of who aren't NPR junkies, Radio Lab is a sonically dense, narrative driven science shown broadcast out of WNYC. Each episode has a theme (ala This American Life), and then...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 9:59 AM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 1, 2007
Category: Culture
I'm not a big Damien Hirst fan, but this is really beautiful: The diamond encrusted skull, which is estimated to be worth more than $50 million, comes from the skeleton of a man who lived between 1720 and 1810....
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 1:49 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Culture
Razib has a frighteningly smart post on religion, secularism, Korea, etc., but I thought this excerpt was worth noting: Religion adapts to the world as it is, engaging in dynamic processes of retrofitting. If supernaturalism is the cognitive default in...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 12:15 PM • 13 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
