Jonah Lehrer is an editor at large for Seed Magazine. His first book is Proust Was A Neuroscientist. Buy it here.
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 • 7 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 • 4 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
September 20, 2007
Category: Culture
I've said it before and I'll say it again: the vast majority of hybrid cars aren't worth the surcharge. You'd get much better mileage with a smaller engine, especially if it was a clean diesel. What worries me about hybrids...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:40 AM • 14 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Culture
So it's the High Holy Day season again - the pious two weeks in the Jewish calendar connecting Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur - and that means that many American Jews are going to shul. For most of these religious...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 9:57 AM • 23 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
September 19, 2007
Category: Culture
There's a really wonderful article by Oliver Sacks in the New Yorker this week, excerpted from his forthcoming Musicophilia. I've got a profile of Sacks in the next issue of Seed (hitting newsstands soon), which was a real thrill to...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 8:08 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
September 18, 2007
Category: Culture
Do the arts serve a purpose in a scientific world?
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 11:17 AM • 8 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Culture
One of the more fascinating bits of research I couldn't cram into my recent article on the bird brain concerned some work out Erich Jarvis' lab. In 2004, Jarvis and colleagues found that songbirds have a nearly identical version of...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:20 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
September 17, 2007
Category: Culture
One day, your iPod will be made out of biological flesh. Just kidding. In general, I'm a pretty staunch skeptic of The Singularity, but I've got to admit that experiments like this are pretty rad: A team in Silver's HMS...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 1:23 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Culture
I've always thought someone could make a great television show by featuring some of the more bizarre and enlightening neurological syndromes that afflict the human brain. What is it like, for example, to not have an amygdala, or OFC, or...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 8:56 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Culture
I've got an article in yesterday's Boston Globe on the acute intelligence of birds, which is a by-product of their sociality: There is a growing scientific recognition of the genius of birds. Scientists are now studying various birds to explore...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 7:52 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
September 16, 2007
Category: Culture
Gary Taubes has a pretty damning takedown of modern epidemiology at the Times Magazine: In the case of H.R.T. [Hormone Replacement Therapy], as with most issues of diet, lifestyle and disease, the hypotheses begin their transformation into public-health recommendations only...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 8:14 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
September 14, 2007
David Brooks makes a really smart macro point today about one of the big themes of modern neuroscience. His op-ed (Times $elect) is about the decline of IQ as a general metric of intelligence: Today, the research that dominates public...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:16 AM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Culture
There was something sad yet slightly poignant about watching President Bush's speech on Iraq last night. I thought Andrew Sullivan got the atmospherics exactly right: He seemed almost broken to me. His voice raspy, his eyes watery, his affect exhausted,...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 9:15 AM • •
September 13, 2007
Category: Culture
What Kanye West can teach us about the neuroscience of music.
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:58 AM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
September 12, 2007
Category: Culture
My vestibular system is totally confused: See James Fallows for the explanation. Movies like this make me glad that pilots rely on gyroscopes to guide them through the clouds....
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 1:23 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Culture
Just a quick note on the liberal/conservative psychological study that everyone is talking about. (Dave Munger has a thorough write-up here.) Color me dubious. My own bias is to distrust any experiment that tries to collapse extremely complex cognitive categories...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:50 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Culture
Boy, was Descartes wrong. His philosophy of duality divided our being into two distinct substances: a holy soul and a mortal carcass. The soul was the source of reason, science and everything nice. Our flesh, on the other hand, was...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 6:46 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
September 10, 2007
Category: Culture
There are so many stupid studies of the gendered brain that it's easy to conclude that good research into psychological sex differences is impossible. But that would be a mistake. I think one of most interesting recent investigations into the...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 11:25 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
September 7, 2007
Category: Culture
Yawning is famously contagious. Except that is, if you're autistic. Here's Mindhacks: The study showed that children with autism were far less likely to yawn in response to watching others do the same. Often, autistic social difficulties are put down...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 3:38 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Culture
From Primo Levi's Survival in Auschwitz: Sooner of later, everyone discovers that perfect happiness is unrealizable, but there are few who pause to consider the antithesis: that perfect unhappiness is equally unattainable. The obstacles preventing the realization of both these...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 1:19 PM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Culture
In my post on warm milk and sleepiness - the dairy acts like a placebo - a commenter made an astute point: what does "placebo" mean in that context? If you have developed the pathways that insist on Warm Milk...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:44 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
September 6, 2007
Category: Culture
From Tyler Cowen: 1. In Danish data, if a CEO's child dies, the value of that CEO's company falls by one-fifth in the following two years. 2. If a CEO's wife dies, the value of that CEO's company falls by...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 11:05 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Culture
Is it bad if your favorite philosophy comes in aphorism form? This is why I've always enjoyed Wittgenstein: his writing has the density of plutonium, since it's just pre-digested quotes. I can read it without having to remember what anomalous...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:57 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Culture
Chemistry gets short shrift. Theoretical physics and neuroscience and molecular biology get all the sexy press, while chemistry departments slowly wither away. In many respects, this is just because chemistry has been so successful: there don't seem to be any...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:24 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Culture
So tax breaks for philanthropy increase inequality: For every three dollars they give away, the federal government typically gives up a dollar or more in tax revenue, because of the charitable tax deduction and by not collecting estate taxes. [snip]...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:10 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
September 5, 2007
Category: Culture
One of the innate limitations of every intelligence test is that the test is forced to conflate the measurable aspects of intelligence with a general definition of intelligence. What can't be quantified is ignored. And what can be easily quantified...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 11:05 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Culture
My own experience tells me that a glass of warm milk is a potent sedative. All it takes is a few ounces of heated dairy before my eye lids start getting real heavy. It turns out, though, that warm milk...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 9:55 AM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
September 4, 2007
Category: Culture
I'm a big fan of Mad Men, the new HBOesque drama about 1960's advertising executives on AMC. It's basically an extended melodrama about why the Ike years actually sucked, and neatly punctures that lame American nostalgia for the "simpler" times...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 7:10 PM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
September 2, 2007
Category: Culture
Saw Bill and Hillary today. I'll spare you my political commentary, except for two brief observations: 1) Hillary's biggest applause line came when she declared that, once she's President, she'll "listen to what scientists say and stop being so anti-science"....
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 4:56 PM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
