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Jonah Lehrer is a contributing editor at Wired. He's also written for The New Yorker, Seed, Nature, the Boston Globe and is a contributor to Radio Lab. He's the author of Proust Was A Neuroscientist. His new book is How We Decide.
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 • 8 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 • 8 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
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