Now on ScienceBlogs: The Galaxy's Biggest Valentine
Jonah Lehrer is a contributing editor at Wired. He's also written for The New Yorker, Seed, Nature, and the New York Times and is a contributor to Radiolab. He's the author of Proust Was A Neuroscientist. His new book is How We Decide.
September 28, 2007
Category: Culture
In light of Mahmoud Ahmadenijad's recent comment about there being no gay people in Iran, Matthew Yglesias links to this really interesting article about homosexuals in Saudi Arabia: What seems more startling, at least from a Western perspective, is that...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 12:19 PM • 8 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
September 26, 2007
From David Leonhardt: There appears to be a growing happiness gap between men and women. Two new research papers, using very different methods, have both come to this conclusion. Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers, economists at the University of Pennsylvania...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 8:38 AM • 8 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Culture
Fear isn't our most rational feeling; the amygdala is an inherently inscrutable bit of brain. Tyler Cowen makes a good point about how the irrationality of fear manifests itself with global warming: I believe, for instance, that ocean acidification will,...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 7:25 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
September 25, 2007
Category: Culture
Here's Drake Bennett: In a set of experiments carried out in 2005 by the economists Nina Mazar and Dan Ariely, of MIT, and On Amir, a marketing expert at the University of California at San Diego, subjects were given a...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 12:26 PM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Culture
Can you engineer a yawn to become perfectly contagious? A number of studies found that a medley of ordinary yawns on video played to a classroom for five minutes would induce a responsive yawn in 55 percent of the audience....
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:17 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
September 24, 2007
Category: Culture
1) Away, by Amy Bloom. The prose is perfect. It's the best written new novel you'll read this year, and that's saying something, since Ian McEwan also came out with a new novel. Another interesting thing about the book is...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 9:27 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Culture
Loss aversion is so easy to understand - it can be explained using a coin flip in ten seconds - and yet it manages to explain so many anomalies of modern life*, from the 4th down habits of football coaches...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 9:14 AM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
September 21, 2007
Category: Culture
Like many Patriots fans, I've been suffering from an acute case of cognitive dissonance ever since I learned about Bill Belichick's taping habits. On the one hand, I know cheating is wrong. On the other hand, winning sure feels good....
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 5:27 PM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Culture
Context is everything: Sana Klaric and husband Adnan, who used the names "Sweetie" and "Prince of Joy" in an online chatroom, spent hours telling each other about their marriage troubles, Metro.co.uk reported. The truth emerged when the two turned up...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 12:18 PM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Culture
Alan Greenspan seems to have discovered the irrationality of human nature. In his recent appearance on the Daily Show, he lamented the stubborn persistence of financial bubbles, from junk bonds to dot-com stocks to real estate. (For a thorough history...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:08 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
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