Jonah Lehrer is an editor at large for Seed Magazine. His first book is Proust Was A Neuroscientist. Buy it here.
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 • 9 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 • 2 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 • 9 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 • 12 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 • 5 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 • 8 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
March 20, 2008
Over at Mind Matters, the expert blog I curate at Scientific American, we've had some really good posts lately. The most recent post, by Maryanne Wolf (author of that other Proust book on neuroscience, Proust and the Squid), Mirit Barzillai...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 3:35 PM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
March 19, 2008
First, watch this: Then read the poem it inspired, which was written by one of my favorite poets, Wislawa Szymborska: The Experiment As a short subject before the main feature - in which the actors did their best to make...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 5:12 PM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
I guess I should make it clear that, contrary to the title of my talk, Kanye West isn't really a neuroscientist. (Conveying irony via the internet isn't easy. Although it's still amusing to imagine him, in full rapper regalia, doing...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 12:23 PM • 11 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Flying back from Little Rock, I had the pleasure of sitting next to a 68 year old man who had never flown on a plane before. For most of us, traveling through the air at 400 mph on a steel...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 12:06 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
March 18, 2008
Kennedy Fraser had an illuminating profile of the novelist Pat Barker in a recent New Yorker (not online): Barker grew up with silent, wounded men. "And with talkative women, spinning stories," she said. "Stories with bits missing." She is a...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 8:56 AM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
March 17, 2008
If I've got any readers in the Little Rock area, you might be interested in a little talk I'm giving tomorrow evening at the Clinton School of Public Service. The title of the talk is "Kanye West Was A Neuroscientist,"...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 4:26 PM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
This is very depressing: The Chinook salmon that swim upstream to spawn in the fall, the most robust run in the Sacramento River, have disappeared. The almost complete collapse of the richest and most dependable source of Chinook salmon south...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 12:14 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
A few weeks ago, John Lanchester wrote a thoughtful meditation on the intertwined nature of perception, smell and taste: A taste or a smell can pass you by, unremarked or nearly so, in large part because you don't have a...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 11:45 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
March 14, 2008
It's long been recognized that American kids suck at math, at least when compared to kids in Singapore, Finland, etc. What's less well known is that the steep decline in proficiency only starts when kids are taught algebra. That, at...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 11:46 AM • 25 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
March 13, 2008
Via bookslut comes a heartbreaking excerpt from Roger Deakin's Wildwood: A Journey Through Trees: [Konrad] Lorenz observed that jackdaws form lifelong attachments, as rooks seem to do, and that there is a distinct, well-understood pecking order within the tribe to...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:47 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
One last note on the whole Spitzer affair. The reason I think it's dangerous to use the sexual habits of other species (or even other human cultures) as a baseline when discussing prostitution is that the evolutionary argument has very...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:17 AM • 12 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
March 12, 2008
Evolutionary psychologist David Barash excuses the behavior of Eliot Spitzer on the grounds that monogamy is unnatural, an artificial construct of bourgeois civilization: One of the most important insights of modern evolutionary biology has been an enhanced understanding of male-female...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 1:13 PM • 30 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Words of wisdom from Dario Checcini, the famous Tuscan butcher: "The most important thing is what the animal eats and that it has a good life . . . just like us," Cecchini says. "My philosophy is that the cow...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 11:59 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
March 11, 2008
I've always been morbidly fascinated by examples of choking. It doesn't matter if it's Jean Van de Velde in the 1999 British Open, or Shaq at the free-throw line, there's something unbelievably poignant and nightmarish about watching a world-class performer...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 1:48 PM • 11 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
This whole Spitzer affair got me thinking about the psychology of power. When you look around the world, it's clear that so many of our problems are due, at least in part, to abuses of power. From Mugabe to Putin,...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:24 AM • 8 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
March 10, 2008
This is crazy stuff: A new study finds that moths can remember things they learned when they were caterpillars -- even though the process of metamorphosis essentially turns their brains and bodies to soup. The implications of the PLOS study...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 2:34 PM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Cognitive Daily has a typically great review of some recent research connecting blood glucose levels and self-control: Matthew Gailliot, along with Baumeister and six other researchers, asked 103 psychology students to fast for three hours before watching a video [the...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 1:14 PM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
March 7, 2008
It's a new pilot program in a few dozen New York City schools: students are given cash rewards in exchange for higher test scores. Jennifer Medina reports: The fourth graders squirmed in their seats, waiting for their prizes. In a...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:24 AM • 15 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
March 6, 2008
The NY Times group blog on Migraines just posted a really fantastic article by Jeff Tweedy, leader of Wilco (one of my favorite bands), on his chronic migraine condition: There are a lot of different ways migraines have affected my...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:07 AM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Radio Lab delves into the mystery: Yang and her colleagues put all 49 people, both the liars and the non-liars, into a magnetic resonant imaging scanner and took pictures of their prefrontal cortex. They chose to focus on this area...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 9:51 AM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
March 5, 2008
One of the most frequent questions I get when speaking about my book is the MSG question. My talk is about L-glutamate, the taste of umami and veal stock (it makes a little more sense if you've read the book)...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 4:59 PM • 11 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
My article on the Blue Brain project is now online*: It took less than two years for the Blue Brain supercomputer to accurately simulate a neocortical column, which is a tiny slice of brain containing approximately 10,000 neurons, with about...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:17 AM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
March 4, 2008
I know I just wrote an article on the power of expectations, but this is ridiculous: In a series of studies in the 1970s and '80s, psychologists at the University of Washington put more than 300 students into a study...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 2:46 PM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
March 3, 2008
The Times has an interesting profile of Johan Santana, perhaps the most effective pitcher in baseball. What's interesting about Santana is that his secret isn't a 98 mph fastball or some wicked new breaking ball. Rather, he strikes out batters...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 11:13 AM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
