Jonah Lehrer is an editor at large for Seed Magazine. His first book is Proust Was A Neuroscientist. Buy it here.
December 31, 2007
Just wanted to thank everyone for making this blog such a consistent source of pleasure for me. I don't deserve such a smart audience, but I'm endlessly grateful for it. And thanks for putting up with all the shameless self-horn...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 3:09 PM • 8 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
One of the unfortunate consequences of Iowa and New Hampshire getting so much snow this December is that it has really muted the discussion of global warming. I've now been to enough campaign events to realize that the weather definitely...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 9:59 AM • 8 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Here in central New Hampshire, we got another 10-12 inches of snow last night. It's been a winter of heavy precipitation, with sleet giving way to wet snow which turns into powder which eventually freezes into rock solid ice. This...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 9:55 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
December 28, 2007
I'm certainly no music critic, but since it's the season of top 10 lists, I thought I'd share my favorite songs of the year, even if my list is bound to typecast me as yet another overeducated twentysomething with a...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:15 AM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
December 27, 2007
So I'm browsing the juice section at my local supermarket, trying to figure out if I like pulpy bits in my orange juice, when I notice that Minute Maid has a new line of "enhanced juices". I couldn't help but...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 3:39 PM • 14 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
We still don't understand it.
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 9:59 AM • 8 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
December 26, 2007
Is altruism really innate? PS. Martin's new memoir is really great....
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 9:31 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
I hope everyone had a lovely and merry Christmas. I've got a post-Christmas question: What cognitive skills are required for present-wrapping? Spatial logic? An intuitive sense of geometry? A belief in neatness? All of the above? I only ask because...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 9:15 AM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
December 23, 2007
I've got a review of Pinker's latest in The Washington Post: Language comes so naturally to us that it's easy to believe there's some sort of intrinsic logic connecting the thing and its name, the signifier and the signified. In...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 6:28 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
December 20, 2007
I always assumed that the best race horses simply had the best genes. It seemed like the kind of domain where nature trumped nurture, where the genetics of fast twitch fibers and heart size was more important than the details...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 12:55 PM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Since it's supposed to be the season of charity, that time of year when we remember those who are less fortunate than we are, I thought I'd post on altruism and the brain, since there have recently been a few...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 12:40 PM • 9 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
December 19, 2007
Malcolm Gladwell endorses the use of Human Growth Hormone for athletes, at least when it's used to recover from injury: What, exactly, is wrong with an athlete--someone who makes a living with their body--taking medication to speed their recovery from...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 12:13 PM • 11 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Ben Wallace-Wells, in Rolling Stone, recently wrote a fantastic and tragic article on America's War on Drugs: All told, the United States has spent an estimated $500 billion to fight drugs - with very little to show for it. Cocaine...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 9:55 AM • 17 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
December 18, 2007
Are teenagers too rational? That, at least, is the conclusion of a recent study showing that teens overestimate the riskiness of things like unprotected sex and drunk driving, yet choose to do them anyways: A study by researchers at the...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 2:19 PM • 27 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
December 17, 2007
For a wonderful example of Oliver Sacks' "romantic scientific method" at work - a method he borrowed, at least in part, from the great Russian neurologist A.R. Luria - listen to this NPR piece, by Robert Krulwich. It's a beautiful...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 1:11 PM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
December 14, 2007
There was a very astute comment left in response to my post on evolution and psychopaths: Normal people (however you define that term) can be desensitized to the suffering of others. Soldiers fighting in a war - those who don't...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 2:23 PM • 11 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
December 13, 2007
The latest issue of Nature has a thought-provoking article on new research trying to understand the psychopathic brain. On most psychological tests, psychopaths appear perfectly normal. Their working memory isn't impaired, they use language normally, and they don't have reduced...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 5:16 PM • 10 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Home sales are plummeting. In the Times, David Leonhardt focuses on Paramount, CA, site of the most precipitous drop in home sales in the country: Just south of Los Angeles, there is a small city called Paramount where houses have...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:24 AM • 12 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
December 12, 2007
Paul Ekman, the eminent UCSF psychologist, has a new exhibit of his photography on display at the Exploratorium in San Francisco. The photographs are primarily of the South Fore people, an isolated group living in the New Guinea highlands. Ekman...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 9:59 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
December 11, 2007
The answer is a tenuous yes, although it depends on where you live. If your local utility burns lots of coal, then perhaps you should stick with a fuel efficient compact car. If you don't know how your local utility...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:59 AM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
I'm honored/flattered/thrilled/etc. to have Proust Was A Neuroscientist listed as one of the 25 best non-fiction books of the year by the LA Times. Other science-themed* books included on the list are The Atomic Bazaar, by William Langewiesche and Leviathan:...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:36 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Shakespeare bent language in peculiar ways. He had a habit of violating our conventional grammatical categories, so that nouns became verbs and adjectives were turned into nouns. (This is known as a functional shift.) Here's Phillip Davis: Thus in "Lear"...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:15 AM • 8 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Jason Kottke, a consistent fount of great links, finds a revealing interview with David Foster Wallace about Infinite Jest. Here is DFW answering a question about whether or not his novel actually follows a fractal form*: David Foster Wallace: That's...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 9:49 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
December 10, 2007
No, it's not an oxymoron: philosophers have discovered the virtue of experimentation. Now a restive contingent of our tribe is convinced that it can shed light on traditional philosophical problems by going out and gathering information about what people actually...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 9:17 AM • 20 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
December 8, 2007
The Times takes the FCX for a spin. The good news is that it drives like an ordinary car, even though it runs on hydrogen: Normalcy is a recurring, and intentional, theme of the FCX Clarity. It is refueled using...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 8:59 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
So I was out to dinner recently with some friends and the conversation eventually degenerated into a dork competition. The rules of the game are simple (and extremely dorky). Each person confesses the single dorkiest thing about them. The winner...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 8:45 AM • 25 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
December 6, 2007
So the new Seed is now on the newstands. I've got a longish essay sketching out possible future interactions between science and art: The current constraints of science make it clear that the breach between our two cultures is not...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 3:59 PM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
The data is hard to believe: It has long been known that dyslexics are drawn to running their own businesses, where they can get around their weaknesses in reading and writing and play on their strengths. But a new study...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:28 AM • 10 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
December 5, 2007
From VSL comes this list of truly weird scientific studies. My favorite was this one, which "assesses the link between country music and metropolitan suicide rates": Country music is hypothesized to nurture a suicidal mood through its concerns with problems...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 12:16 PM • 25 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
From the great Harold McGee comes an investigation into raw milk, bacteria and cultural evolution: On our journey up to the Stichelton Dairy last September, Mr. Hodgson [a cheesemaker] explained how cheese quality progressed for centuries, then declined in the...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 9:59 AM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
December 4, 2007
As I note in my book, the most famous impressionists all suffered from serious medical problems: Monet became blind (but didn't stop painting the bridges of Giverny). Vincent Van Gogh, drinker of kerosene, turpentine, and absinthe, probably thought the coronas...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:49 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
I had the pleasure of driving for a few hours in yesterday's New England blizzard. (I was coming back from a radio interview for "On Point," which is broadcast out of WBUR in Boston. You can listen to me here.)...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:05 AM • 15 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
December 1, 2007
PZ attacks religious beliefs with his usual angry panache: Religion is a bad thing. It encourages people to believe in things that are not true. It really is as simple as that; we'd be better off if people valued truth...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 11:25 AM • 39 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
