Now on ScienceBlogs: Let the War on Christmas being. Atheist style.
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.
March 31, 2008
The Economist has compiled a really interesting chart on the ideological differences between the American and British electorates. (I've been kind of obsessed with all things Anglo-American since the start of the John Adams miniseries on HBO.) The article focuses...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 4:12 PM • 10 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
This is from The Paris Review Interviews, Volume 1: Q: I would like to ask about your having said that you were very timid about beginning to write stories. Borges: Yes, I was very timid because when I was young...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 9:43 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Someone should really tell the NCAA tournament television commentators that "the hot hand" doesn't exist. I've gotten pretty tired of hearing these tired cliches about Texas going cold, or Stephen Curry catching fire yet again. Never has a cognitive illusion...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 8:11 AM • 10 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
March 27, 2008
If you happen to be in the Charlottesville area, I'll be at the Virginia Book Festival tomorrow afternoon, on a panel entitled: "The Creative Mind: How Artists and Writers Invent the World."...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:20 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
A commenter asked an astute question in response to my post on religion and dietary laws: What are your thoughts on kashrut primarily as a means of group indentity reinforcement, ritual, and control? In pre-literate times or in unstable social...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 4:19 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
March 26, 2008
I was raised in a kosher household, which meant that I grew up convinced that bacon, lobster, pepperoni pizza and cheeseburgers were the promised land of food. (I assumed the banning of trafe was part of God's punishment for Eve...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:34 AM • 13 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
March 25, 2008
I had no idea this many Americans were nocturnal: Twenty percent of American workers are night-shift workers, and the number is growing by about 3% per year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. While the rest of society sleeps,...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:11 AM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
March 24, 2008
If you're into art, science and the brain, or enjoyed the recent MoMA show on design, then be sure to check out this Seed/MoMA/Parsons event on April 4th. The guest list is pretty fantastic, and includes everyone from Benoit Mandelbrot...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 12:27 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
My bracket is a disaster: I seem to have an uncanny talent for picking all the wrong upsets. But perhaps I should find solace in the fact that the NCAA tournament is inherently unpredictable. That, at least, was the conclusion...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:29 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
March 21, 2008
Over at Mixing Memory, there's an excellent and fierce critique of a recent fMRI paper on linguistic relativity. Although the post is shot through with overly broad insults - he or she complains about "how much cognitive neuroscience sucks" -...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 12:37 PM • 16 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
