Jonah Lehrer is an editor at large for Seed Magazine. His first book is Proust Was A Neuroscientist. Buy it here.
February 29, 2008
Jim Holt has a great article on the strange neural anatomy of mathematics in the new New Yorker: One morning in September, 1989, a forme sales representative in his mid-fortie entered an examination room with Stanisla Dehaene, a young neuroscientist...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 8:10 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
February 28, 2008
Noam Scheiber has an article in TNR touting Obama's connections to behavioral economics. The article isn't particularly persuasive, since the only examples Scheiber can muster are Obama's 401(k) savings plan and his embrace of automatic tax returns. Neither plan is...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 6:17 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
A cool new PNAS paper from the Koch lab: In their experiment, the researchers presented six volunteers with four types of ambiguous stimuli. The volunteers viewed or listened to the stimuli and pressed a key on a keyboard when a...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 12:47 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Ronald Bailey looks at the data and concludes that having children doesn't make us happy: "Economists have modeled the impact of many variables on people's overall happiness and have consistently found that children have only a small impact. A small...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:16 AM • 21 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
February 27, 2008
Lots of attention has been paid to the latest review/meta-analysis demonstrating that popular antidepressant medications don't seem to be that much more effective than placebos. While this certainly isn't the first time someone has demonstrated that Prozac is only mildly...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 12:59 PM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
February 26, 2008
Molly Young has a really interesting article on the rampant abuse of Adderall in elite universities in n+1. Essentially, Adderall is a composite of several different amphetamines, which are digested by the brain at different rates. So many kids are...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:58 AM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
I had an article in the Sunday Boston Globe Ideas section on the way our expectations of reality often trump reality itself: Expectations have long been a topic of psychological research, and it's well known that they affect how we...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 9:52 AM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
February 22, 2008
Loyal readers know that I'm a big fan of Jason Kottke. His blog, aptly summarized as "liberal arts 2.0," is a consistent source of the best and smartest links from around the web. So I was really flattered to get...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 3:00 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Michael Specter has written a really fine article on the ambiguities and complexities involved in the measurement of carbon emissions. Sounds dull, right? It's actually full of fascinating facts: Just two countries--Indonesia and Brazil--account for about ten per cent of...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:45 AM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
In my recent Seed article on science and art, I wrote about how we need to foster a new cultural movement: If we are serious about unifying human knowledge, then we'll need to create a new movement that coexists with...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:21 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
February 21, 2008
First, a warning: the video below is very disturbing. It's footage of cows being prepared for slaughter at Hallmark Meat Processing. This video, which was surreptitiously shot by the Humane Society, led to the largest ever recall of beef -...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 1:48 PM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
A fascinating, if macabre, interview with a man who intentionally cut off his hand: BME: We've touched on it, but I guess now the big question -- "why"? I'm one of those body-integrity-disorder (BIID) dudes. As long as I can...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:15 AM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
February 20, 2008
Michel Foucault wouldn't be surprised to learn that yes, even comedy is defined by power-relations. Here's Ellen Horne of Radio Lab: Tyler Stillman, a psychologist at Florida State University, did a series of studies showing that laughter isn't always about...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 12:41 PM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Have you heard about InnoCentive? It's my new favorite website. The premise of the site is simple: "seekers" post their scientific problems and "solvers" try to solve them. If the problem is successfully solved, then the "solver" gets a specified...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:32 AM • 8 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
February 19, 2008
Exciting news! I'm the new curator of the Scientific American expert blog seminar Mind Matters. (Thanks, David!) For those of you who are unfamiliar with the site, it features commentary by real scientists on recent scientific papers. This week's blog...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 9:59 AM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
February 18, 2008
First, read this: Prince Rupert's Drops are a glass curiosity created by dripping hot molten glass into cold water. The glass cools into a tadpole-shaped droplet with a long, thin, tail. The water rapidly cools the molten glass on the...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 11:24 AM • 8 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
There's a nice overview of recent work on animal cognition in the latest National Geographic. Certain skills are considered key signs of higher mental abilities: good memory, a grasp of grammar and symbols, self-awareness, understanding others' motives, imitating others, and...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:06 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
February 15, 2008
There are so many reasons to despair about human diversity. There's Iraq, Kenya, the immigration debate, the research of Robert Putnam. It seems that, in tragic example after tragic example, humans react to diversity by splintering into tribalisms, regressing to...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 9:58 AM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
February 14, 2008
To call "Radio Lab" a science radio show is like calling "This American Life" a radio show about, well, what the hell is "This American Life" about? (Quirky themes? Good stories? Bourgeois dilemmas?) The point is that the best radio...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:41 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
February 13, 2008
Woody Allen was a prescient man. Dr. Stuart Meloy has created a device that seems to help women with sexual problems regain their ability to have an orgasm: The experimental implant -- now trademarked by Meloy as the Orgasmatron after...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 12:55 PM • 11 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
The Times Magazine had an interesting article on whether or not "preterm infants" can experience pain. "Experience" is the key word in that sentence: In a series of clinical trials, he [Kanwaljeet Anand] demonstrated that operations performed under minimal or...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:33 AM • 10 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
February 12, 2008
It's so easy to take our cultural forms for granted. We get so used to their particulars that we forget there is nothing inviolate about them. Movies can have sad endings, classical music can turn atonal and novelists can get...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 2:28 PM • 9 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Remember a few years ago, when there were all these books that tried to explain the history of everything in terms of some seemingly minor subject, like "Cod" or "Salt"? I think it's time to apply this publishing trope to...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 11:31 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
February 11, 2008
There was something particularly infuriating about Mitt Romney's concession speech. He's clearly a smart guy - once upon a time, he was a socially moderate, pragmatic Republican - and yet the address was filled with utter nonsense like this: Europe...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 9:59 AM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
February 10, 2008
I recently had the pleasure of getting interviewed by Natasha Mitchell, host of All in the Mind. To be honest, I can't bear to listen to the interview - the sound of my own voice grates against my ears, like...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 9:48 AM • 14 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
February 7, 2008
Here's a good test of your critical acumen. This site has a quiz comparing the priceless designs of Donald Judd against cheap furniture from Ikea and Wal-Mart. It's often surprisingly hard to tell the two apart, although I take this...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 11:21 AM • 15 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
We spend so much time fixating on our genetic differences that we tend to overlook the places where the human genome has converged over time. In a study published yesterday in Nature Genetics, geneticists from France's Pasteur Institute compared DNA...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:24 AM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
February 6, 2008
Deprive the mind of sensory stimuli, and what does the mind do? It starts to hallucinate. It invents perceptions amid the emptiness, filling in the void with make-believe. This is known as Charles Bonnet syndrome, and it affects approximately 10...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:29 AM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
February 5, 2008
That is, if your window happens to be a cockpit over Maui. I thank the reader who sent this photo in. Not only does the tropical sunset brighten another gloomy New England day, but it reminds us that even wind...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 2:47 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
I'm morbidly fascinated by the massive losses recently incurred by the French Bank Societe Generale. My fascination is partly rooted in the sheer scale of the disaster, a scale that's essentially incomprehensible. (I have no idea what a $7,000,000,000 loss...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 12:13 PM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
February 4, 2008
I'm really looking forward to reading Anne Harrington's new book on the history of mind-body medicine. I thought this factoid, from her interview with the Boston Globe Ideas section, was quite interesting: IDEAS: One of the things I learned reading...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 12:25 PM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
This video is shamefully manipulative. It's just a bunch of celebrities, from Scarlett to John Legend, harmonizing over a particularly eloquent Obama speech. The rhetoric is beautiful, poetic and vapid. The camera work is a little too artful. The crescendo...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:34 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Apparently, if you breathe in vaporized bits of swine cortex you have a decent chance of getting very sick. That, at least, is the tenuous conclusion of a doctors in Minnesota: The ailment is characterized by sensations of burning, numbness...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:11 AM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
February 2, 2008
This is from Paul Bloom's review of Kwame Anthony Appiah's new book on the uses and abuses of experimental philosophy: Near the end of the book, Appiah says that when he tells a stranger on a plane that he is...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:47 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
February 1, 2008
This prank reminds me of that Stanley Milgram experiment where people stopped on busy New York City sidewalks and looked up. When only one person was stopped, about 4 percent of pedestrians joined the man and looked at whatever he...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 11:28 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
