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Jonah Lehrer is a contributing editor at Wired. He's also written for The New Yorker, Seed, Nature, the Boston Globe and is a contributor to Radio Lab. He's the author of Proust Was A Neuroscientist. His new book is How We Decide.
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 • 7 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 • 24 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 • 9 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 • 7 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
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