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.
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 • 9 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 • 6 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): I've put the entire article below the fold:...
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 • 13 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
The importance of regret and the ventral caudate.
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 2:58 PM • 4 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 • 11 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 • 14 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 • 19 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 • 9 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
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