Vacation
A note to my readers: I'll be on vacation for the next week, so please pardon the sporadic posting. Thanks, Jonah...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 1:27 PM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Search this blog
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
Recent Comments
- Katie on Understanding Tragedy
- Alex on GPS Sucks
- Noni Mausa on GPS Sucks
- SMD on Understanding Tragedy
- SMD on Understanding Tragedy
- jfrancis on Understanding Tragedy
- nicole on Mutants
- Allison on Understanding Tragedy
- kat on Poetry and Special Effects
- Mary on Understanding Tragedy
Archives
- May 2008
- April 2008
- March 2008
- February 2008
- January 2008
- December 2007
- November 2007
- October 2007
- September 2007
- August 2007
- July 2007
- June 2007
- May 2007
- April 2007
- March 2007
- February 2007
- January 2007
- December 2006
- November 2006
- October 2006
- September 2006
- August 2006
- July 2006
- June 2006
Blogs I've Recently Enjoyed
July 27, 2007
July 24, 2007
The Honesty of Autism
Category: Culture
Simon Baron-Cohen, of mindblindness fame, uses autism to examine the psychology of dishonesty. He concludes that the central reason people with autism are so honest (and so vulnerable to liars) is that they have difficulty developing a theory of mind...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 2:26 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Great Moments in Scientific Theorizing
Category: Culture
This truth thing is difficult: In 1977, Steven Weinberg, then two years shy of the Nobel Prize in Physics, decided to do a little of what some theorists call "ambulance chasing." He heard a rumor, while spending a year at...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 9:28 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
July 23, 2007
The Marketing of A Primate
Category: Culture
Are bonobos really such peaceful beatniks? Is is true that they like to make love, not war? The truth is that nobody really knows. Ian Parker has a fascinating profile of the species, and our attempts to learn about the...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 4:30 PM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Bad Jury Verdicts
Category: Culture
False convictions are a by-product of our psychology
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:14 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
July 20, 2007
Movement in Slow Motion
Category: Culture
This is the coolest study of movement since Muybridge....
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 12:57 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Golf, Choking and the Unconscious
Category: Culture
Why athletes choke.
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:17 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
July 19, 2007
Morality and Materialism
Category: Culture
Ramesh Ponnuru, of the National Review, says this: What renders atheism incompatible with a coherent account of morality, when it is incompatible, is physicalism (or what is sometimes described as reductive materialism). If it is true that the universe consists...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:42 AM • 19 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Mobs and Neuroscience
Category: Culture
Some crimes are beyond the pale of comprehension. This is one of those: After dark on June 18, the police say, as many as 10 armed assailants repeatedly raped a Haitian immigrant in her apartment at Dunbar Village and then...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:19 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
July 18, 2007
Chomsky for Breakfast
Category: Culture
Via Language Log...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 12:25 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
July 17, 2007
The Neuroscience of Gambling
Category: Neuroscience
What casinos have in common with cigarettes.
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:21 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
July 16, 2007
Parrots and PTSD
Category: Culture
It's a brilliant new approach to treating the traumatized minds of war veterans: having them care for rescued and abused parrots. By developing a bond of trust with a bird, the PTSD patients slowly recover their faith in humanity. Listen...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 2:40 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Lion Eating Apes
Category: Culture
Is this a living missing link? Scientists in the Congo have found a band of primates that seem to engage in some very sophisticated hunts. The Guardian reports: Deep in the Congolese jungle is a band of apes that, according...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:23 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
July 13, 2007
Expensive Coffee
Category: Culture
The finest coffee in the world comes from civet crap.
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 12:35 PM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Is Homosexuality An Accident?
Category: Culture
Yesterday, PZ linked to a short list of leading evolutionary explanations for homosexuality. On this subject, PZ is an ardent non-adaptationist: There are really just two classes of explanation [for homosexuality], the adaptationist strategy of trying to find a necessary...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 8:59 AM • 12 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
July 12, 2007
Williams Syndrome
Category: Neuroscience
David Dobbs has a wonderful article in the most recent Times Magazine on Williams syndrome, a development disorder that results in a bizarre mixture of cognitive strengths and deficits: Williams syndrome rises from a genetic accident during meiosis, when DNA's...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 11:16 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Factoids of the Day
Category: Culture
On malaria and left turns.
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:10 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
July 11, 2007
Kids Are Mean (Especially If You're Fat)
Category: Culture
It's easy to forget just how nasty kids can be. They might look cute, but they are such assholes. They prey on differences and disabilities, using taunts to generate solidarity. Middle school really is a terrible time. But I was...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 12:14 PM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
July 10, 2007
Lead and Crime
Category: Culture
Does lead poisoning create criminals?
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 12:49 PM • 8 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
July 9, 2007
Sources of Inequality
Category: Neuroscience
Here's your depressing determinist paper for the day: Is lifetime inequality mainly due to differences across people established early in life or to differences in luck experienced over the working lifetime? We answer this question within a model that features...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 11:16 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
The Struggle for Existence/Belief in Evolution
Category: Culture
So I finally sat down and watched Planet Earth on my new television. It's even better than everybody says: endless hours of the most extravagant nature porn ever put on film. But the show also got me thinking about evolution,...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:29 AM • 18 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
July 6, 2007
The Prius, Hot Rods, and Al Gore III
Category: Culture
When I first heard that Al Gore III was caught going 105 mph in a Prius, I was most impressed by the fact that a Prius can actually go that fast. You must really have to floor the Prius engine...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:09 AM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
July 3, 2007
Incentives
Category: Culture
The problem with incentives.
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:52 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Diversity and Science
Category: Culture
I just got back from spending a few days with a neuroscientist friend who recently became a PI, in charge of his own lab. On one of the walls in his lab, there was a map of the world with...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:37 AM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
