Jonah Lehrer is an editor at large for Seed Magazine. His first book is Proust Was A Neuroscientist. Buy it here.
August 31, 2007
Category: Culture
The new Honda Accord comes out next month and, like virtually every new car, it boasts a bigger frame and bigger engine than last year's model. So I thought it might be worth revisiting some of the earlier generation Accords....
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 12:42 PM • 12 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Neuroscience
A few weeks ago, I put up a post on the neuroscience of subprime mortgages. A significant percentage of subprime loans get customers by advertising low introductory teaser rates, which trick the brain into making an irrational decision. In essence,...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 11:22 AM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Neuroscience
Christopher Vrountas, of Andover, sent in a very astute letter to the Boston Globe in response to my recent article on dopamine and gambling: I read Jonah Lehrer's article "Your brain on gambling" (Ideas, Aug. 19), about how gambling hijacks...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:23 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
August 30, 2007
Category: Culture
Two examples of blinkered thinking: 1. Jeff Lewis, the incredibly entertaining lunatic at the center of Flipping Out, the real-estate reality television show on Bravo, fires his psychic because she wasn't doing a good job of predicting the future. So...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 5:18 PM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Culture
Here's Megan McArdle on our self-perceptions of attractiveness: A late night conversation last night brought me to the inescapable conclusion that neither I, nor anyone else, is as hot as they think they are. You hate photographs of yourself, don't...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:02 AM • 32 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
August 29, 2007
Category: Neuroscience
Ten years ago, neuroscientists were bullish about pharmaceuticals. It sometimes seemed as if every tenured professor was starting his own drug company or consulting for someone else's drug company. But virtually none of those drugs have come to market, at...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:28 AM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Culture
Last week, we discussed the differences between reading text printed on dead trees (paper) and reading on a computer screen. I confessed that I'm wedded to my laser printer, since I can only edit when I've got the tactile page...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 9:53 AM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
August 28, 2007
Category: Culture
For me, the most depressing aspect of the Michael Vick dog-fighting case is that I can't draw a bright moral line between his acts of sadism and the publicly acceptable forms of animal cruelty that we all support in the...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 9:20 AM • 12 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
August 27, 2007
Category: Culture
Daniel Dennett, in the latest Technology Review, argues that there's no meaningful difference between the chess cognition of Deep Blue and that of Gary Kasparov. Both are functionalist machines, employing mental shortcuts to settle on an optimal strategy: The best...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 8:08 AM • 10 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
August 24, 2007
Category: Neuroscience
The Best Cigarette, a poem by Billy Collins: Don't forget that cigarette addiction seems to be modulated by the insula, a brain area that secretes aversive emotions. Earlier this year, a team of scientists at the University of Iowa found...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 9:57 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Neuroscience
Our mind has a sick sense of humor. It turns out that as we lose our memory, and sink into the darkness of dementia, the last memories to disappear are the memories we spent our lives trying to repress. So...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 9:34 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
August 23, 2007
Category: Neuroscience
Here's a very cool experiment: Using virtual reality goggles, a camera and a stick, scientists have induced out-of-body experiences -- the sensation of drifting outside of one's own body -- in healthy people, according to experiments being published in the...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 4:51 PM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
You often hear scientists and philosophers of science talk about the peer-review process as if it's some epistemological magic trick, as if it automatically sifts through the mass of submitted articles and finds The Truth. Of course, if you've ever...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 11:05 AM • 9 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Culture
There were phone phreaks.
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:31 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
August 22, 2007
Category: Neuroscience
How the Battle of Gettysburg led to the discovery of phantom limbs.
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 9:49 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Culture
A few months ago, when I was writing an article on cities and metabolic theory for the latest issue of Seed, I spent several frustrating hours trying to explain the underlying logic of metabolic theory. For those who don't know,...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 9:23 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
August 21, 2007
Category: Culture
I'm one of those writers who can't edit on a computer. After I write something, I'm always forced to print it out on dead trees, so that I can fix my sentences. When I try to edit on the computer,...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 3:21 PM • 13 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Culture
Two economists have studied the effects "of classroom gender composition on scholastic achievements of boys and girls in Israeli primary, middle, and high schools." They wanted to know if having a disproportionate number of one gender in the classroom influences...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 11:30 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
August 20, 2007
Category: Culture
This is the car I covet: And I don't just want the new variant of the Volvo C30 because it's oh so cute: Called the C30 Efficiency, this special car will sip diesel fuel at the rate of 4.5L per...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 2:47 PM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Culture
Pardon the self-promotion, but I've got an article in yesterday's Boston Globe on neuroscience and gambling: The growth of the gambling industry has been accompanied by a large amount of new scientific research explaining the effects of gambling on the...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:35 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Neuroscience
A great series on Gary Lynch.
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:25 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
August 18, 2007
Category: Culture
This seems like a pretty terrible policy: Eric Miller's career as an Army Ranger wasn't ended by a battlefield wound, but his DNA. Lurking in his genes was a mutation that made him vulnerable to uncontrolled tumor growth. After suffering...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 11:39 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
August 17, 2007
Category: Neuroscience
Given the recent bursting of the housing bubble (let's hope, at least, that we've hit rock bottom), Kevin Drum raises an interesting issue: Bubbles come along with some frequency these days, always with some shiny new reason for bankers to...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 9:54 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
August 16, 2007
Category: Culture
Here's a cool new music site. The premise of the site, musicovery.com, is simple: you pick a mood (somewhere between the poles of "energetic," "dark," "calm," or "positive"), select a few musical genres and a favorite decade, and then the...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 11:50 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
August 15, 2007
Category: Culture
Tyler Cowen summarizes a few of the more surprising aspects of the Flynn effect, which refers to the phenomenon of rising scores on mental ability tests (like the IQ test) from one generation to the next: 1. Non-verbal IQ has...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 11:31 AM • 15 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Culture
The Boston Globe recently had an interesting article on some possible downsides of societal diversity, which have been uncomfortably quantified by Robert Putnam, a political scientist at Harvard. Putnam has found that: ...the greater the diversity in a community, the...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:56 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
August 14, 2007
Category: Culture
I had the pleasure of studying philosophy with Nick Bostrom while at Oxford. He's a great teacher, but, unlike John Tierney, I'm not persuaded by his latest conjecture: Until I talked to Nick Bostrom, a philosopher at Oxford University, it...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:52 AM • 23 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Culture
Little kids love McDonald's: Hamburgers, french fries, chicken nuggets, and even milk and carrots all taste better to children if they think they came from McDonald's, a small study suggests. In taste tests with 63 children ages 3 to 5,...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:05 AM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
August 13, 2007
Category: Culture
There is wonderful, disturbing, and extremely graphic article in last week's New Yorker (not online) about Lesch-Nyhan syndrome, a mysterious disorder characterized by excessive amounts of uric acid and a dangerous tendency to injure oneself. In its bleakest incarnation, Lesch-Nyhan...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:49 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
August 10, 2007
Category: Culture
Jon Stewart, interviewing Tal Ben-Shahar, who teaches a positive psychology class at Harvard: "I was a psychology major, so I know a lot of it is bullshit." Watch the video here....
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 8:06 PM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Culture
So the financial markets are all upset. Stocks began the morning with another steep slide. The media, of course, is covering the growing liquidity crisis in excruciating detail, spending lots of hours and column inches analyzing the latest rumors and...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:17 AM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
August 9, 2007
Why so many people take out such bad loans.
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:19 AM • 31 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Culture
Here's your feel-good story of the day. (It feels even better if you're a fan of The Wire. And if you're not a fan of The Wire, then you've made a very big mistake.) The story is a helpful reminder...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 9:48 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
August 8, 2007
Category: Culture
As the author of a book that's equally divided between descriptions of neuroscience and descriptions of art, I've spent far too much time pondering the organization of book stores. How should books be classified? Is my book a "science" book,...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 11:11 AM • 14 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
August 7, 2007
Category: Culture
It turns out that moving to the sun belt will help you live longer. Here's the NBER abstract: We estimate that the number of annual deaths attributable to cold temperature is 27,940 or 1.3% of total deaths in the US....
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 1:19 PM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Culture
Addiction factoid of the Day: Psychiatrist Lee Robins found that almost half of American soldiers used heroin or opium while in Vietnam, but rather fewer were actually addicted, and almost 90 percent of those kicked the habit upon returning to...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:10 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Culture
History tends to make even the most unlikely revolutions seem inevitable. Looking backwards to the 18th century, it's easy to conclude that the Industrial Revolution was bound to happen, that the forward march of modernity was predestined. But what this...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 9:45 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
August 6, 2007
Category: Culture
The human brain craves information and stimulation, and the internet lets us sate our craving. But is there such a thing as too much?
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 11:17 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
