Jonah Lehrer is an editor at large for Seed Magazine. His first book is Proust Was A Neuroscientist. Buy it here.
January 31, 2008
Baudelaire famously described his memory as "a tomb, a corpse filled Potter's field/a pyramid where the dead lie down by scores/I am a graveyard that the moon abhors." Well, the neural reality of the brain suggests that his poetic metaphors...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 11:16 AM • 8 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
One of the questions I get asked most often when discussing my book is what artists working today are creating work that's relevant to the discourse of science. My stock answer is to mutter something inarticulate about Richard Powers. But...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:46 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
I just got back from a week long trip to California. (You can hear me talking about Proust on KQED here.) The weather was awful - rain and more rain - but I still got glimpses of what I love...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:16 AM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
January 30, 2008
I've got a new article on the psychology of back pain in the February issue of Best Life (the one with Jeff Gordon on the cover): From the perspective of the brain, there are two distinct types of pain. The...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 9:59 AM • 15 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
January 24, 2008
Are too many neuroscientists are trying to popularize the state of their science? Jason Zevin thinks so: At best, most of what is known is more complicated than I'm able to understand--much less explain to a general audience. And at...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 9:58 PM • 9 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
The importance of regret and the ventral caudate.
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 2:58 PM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
January 22, 2008
Interesting stuff: The research team led by Tania Singer, at UCL, asked volunteers to play a game with employees of the lab, secretly instructing the employees to play either fairly or unfairly. Afterward, the scientists measured brain activity in the...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:25 AM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
January 21, 2008
Last week, David Brooks had a smart column on the essential "irrationality" of voters. (I'm defining irrationality here as any mental process that's not rational/deliberate/System 2. I have no idea if our democracy would be better off if voters imitated...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 3:18 PM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
I had an op-ed in the LA Times on Sunday. It's about reductionism and the brain: The reductionist method, although undeniably successful, has very real limitations. Not everything benefits from being broken down into tiny pieces. Look, for example, at...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 9:54 AM • 13 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
January 18, 2008
That, at least, is the consensus of a new paper in Neuropharmacology: There is a general consensus that the effects of cannabinoid agonists on anxiety seem to be biphasic, with low doses being anxiolytic and high doses ineffective or possibly...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:24 AM • 8 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
January 17, 2008
Economists parse the stats and find the correlation: We find that college football games are associated with sharp increases in crime. For instance, assaults increase by about 9% when a community hosts a college football game, vandalism increases by about...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 1:10 PM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
I'm definitely ready for the writer's strike to be over. I actually watched two hours of American Idol last night. I haven't watched many of these pre-competition shows before, when Paula, Randy and Simon sit through the auditions of strangers...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 8:15 AM • 8 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
January 16, 2008
My recent article in Seed is now online. Here is the nut graf: The current constraints of science make it clear that the breach between our two cultures is not merely an academic problem that stifles conversation at cocktail parties....
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 12:07 PM • 8 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
I was talking to a neuroscientist the other day and he started complaining about fMRI studies. They are too easy, unreliable, etc. (This is a surprisingly common complaint among neuroscientists who rely on the techniques of molecular biology.) But then...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 11:48 AM • 18 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
I've got a big man-crush on Jamie Oliver. And I really appreciate his latest stunt: Last Friday, in front of 4 million television viewers and a studio audience, the chef Jamie Oliver killed a chicken. Having recently obtained a United...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:32 AM • 19 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
January 15, 2008
So I'm reading about the latest cosmological absurdity and feeling pretty smug. It turns out that, according to the equations, your existence is simply "some momentary fluctuation in a field of matter and energy out in space...Your memories and the...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 1:16 PM • 43 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
I've written about our wine biases before, but now we have anatomical evidence of why, exactly, expensive wine seems to taste better. The experiment, led by researchers at Cal-Tech and Stanford, was simple. [A free version of the study is...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:47 AM • 10 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
January 14, 2008
A reader comments.
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 12:48 PM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
It took a few centuries, but it looks as though psychology and neuroscience are finally moving beyond the dualisms of Descartes. Here is the always interesting Boston Globe Ideas section: The brain is often envisioned as something like a computer,...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:47 AM • 8 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
January 10, 2008
How universal are our first impressions of people? Test yourself against this piece of video art: Do you agree with most of the descriptions? The art is surprisingly riveting, no? Via kottke...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 11:53 AM • 12 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
There's an interview with me in Newsweek.com: NEWSWEEK: What surprised you most while doing the research for this book? Jonah Lehrer: One thing was how seriously all of these artists took their art. They really believed that their novels and...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:40 AM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
One of the many reasons I'm a big fan of Michael Pollan's work, including his latest manifesto, is that he's one of the few science journalists who emphasizes what science doesn't know. Here's an interview from Gourmet: CH: When your...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:12 AM • 10 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
January 9, 2008
From a very interesting interview with Anthony Bourdain: AVC: Do you ever feel like your sense of taste or smell was diminished by your drug use? Bourdain: Who knows? I think, technically, male palates start to decline very early anyway,...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 3:40 PM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Needless to say, the political pundits were hilariously wrong about the New Hampshire primary. I won't hypothesize about what actually happened, other than to say that I think many voters here wanted a longer primary. They didn't want an Obama...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 11:59 AM • 8 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
January 8, 2008
I agree with Jeffrey Goldberg: the first episode of The Wire's final season was disappointing. I was enjoying myself just fine for the first 20 minutes or so, becoming reacquainted with some of my favorite drug dealers--the intensely lovable psycho-killer...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:49 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
The Times has an interesting interview with Scott Page, a professor of complex systems, political science and economics at the University of Michigan: Q. In your book you posit that organizations made up of different types of people are more...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:21 AM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
January 7, 2008
A lovely appreciation: I received the news in an email almost exactly a year ago. As so often in recent years, Rorty voiced his resignation at the "war president" Bush, whose policies deeply aggrieved him, the patriot who had always...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:35 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Sometimes, I feel like the only journalist/blogger in New Hampshire who isn't writing about politics. My street is littered with campaign signs, from Kucinich to Huckabee, that have been stuck haphazardly into the snow. My recycling bin is full of...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:15 AM • 12 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
January 4, 2008
Daniel Davies has compiled a smart list of arguments that he is no longer going to have. He explains: While not necessarily claiming to have the definitive truth on these subjects, my views are no longer up for argument, pending...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 2:59 PM • 9 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
A new book, Shock Therapy, has recently been published, which offers a contrarian take on the history of electroconvulsive therapy, or ECT. I haven't read the book, but Barron Lerner reviews it in Slate: The authors believe that electroconvulsive therapy...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 9:25 AM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
January 3, 2008
Phantom limb syndrome has always been intertwined with war. It was first discovered by Silas Weir Mitchell after the Battle of Gettysburg, when the hospitals of Philadelphia were overwhelmed by soldiers with amputated limbs. Many of these soldiers said that...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 12:13 PM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
One of my resolutions for the new year was spending less time googling myself. (Such are the vanities of an insecure writer.) So far, I'm off to a bad start. I apologize for the self-promotion, but there have recently been...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:37 AM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
January 2, 2008
Lisa Diamond, a psychologist at the University of Utah, deserves credit for bringing a controversial idea to the academic surface. Here's the Boston Globe Ideas section: In this country, we tell a certain story about homosexuality: We believe that people...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:53 AM • 14 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
A novel that exposes our deep similarities.
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 9:57 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
