Jonah Lehrer is an editor at large for Seed Magazine. His first book is Proust Was A Neuroscientist. Buy it here.
April 30, 2008
So there's an acute fertilizer shortage. The big problem is a lack of nitrogen which, although it accounts for most of the atmosphere (78.1 percent), is notoriously tough to "fix," since it's got those pesky triple bonds. One of the...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 11:52 AM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
A calm and cool summary of the value of arts education in public schools: What are "the habits of mind" cultivated in arts classrooms, they ask in their book "Studio Thinking: The Real Benefits of Visual Arts Education." As unsatisfied...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 11:39 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 29, 2008
First, the Hotel St. George Press, a really cool literary publishing group in Brooklyn (where else?) was kind enough to ask me a few questions: Heather McCalden: Would you mind relaying a bit about your experiences in the lab, the...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 5:20 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
The Times has an interesting review of two new books that discuss the oft cited link between mental illness and artistic creativity. It's all too easy to indulge in cliched overgeneralizations about the thin line separating madness and genius, but...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 11:13 AM • 9 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 28, 2008
You probably thought this post was going to be about how Meredith Grey (or perhaps McDreamy?) is a neuroscientist, or how Shonda Rhimes (the creator of Grey's Anatomy) anticipated some surprising discovery of modern neuroscience. Alas, I have no such...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 12:49 PM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
War Emblem, the 2002 Kentucky Derby winner, is one finicky horse: By all accounts, he [War Emblem] is a happy horse -- gamboling through fields most of the day, showing the turn of foot that propelled him to lead every...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 8:58 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 25, 2008
I'm no forager. Once, I took a foraging class in Brooklyn's Prospect Park and managed to find varieties of poisonous mushrooms that even the instructor had never encountered before. (They looked like porcini mushrooms to me.) Nevertheless, I've gotten very...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 4:51 PM • 9 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Razib calls my attention to this new Nature study on the genetic variation underlying the stress response. The researchers focused on neuropeptide Y, an endogenous anxiolytic (it's like an anti-anxiety drug naturally produced by the brain) which is released in...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 9:57 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 24, 2008
It sounds like one of those 1950's psychological experiments that scientific ethics boards no longer allow: Nicholas White was trapped in an elevator in New York City's McGraw-Hill building for forty-one hours. Just thinking about such an ordeal gives me...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 2:38 PM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Go see his new show at MoMA. Here's Peter Schjeldahl: Eliasson is entertaining, yet his central concern seems less a working of spectacular magic than an investigation of how spectacular magic works. He raises awareness of the neurological susceptibilities that...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 11:58 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Rebecca Solnit, author of some wonderful books, astutely describes one of the worst side-effects of testosterone: We were preparing to leave [a party in Aspen] when our host said, "No, stay a little longer so I can talk to you."...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:41 AM • 17 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 23, 2008
Did you know that more than 53 percent of the prisoners in Federal prisons are serving time for drug offenses? That's crazy. When will our politicians realize that drug addiction is a mental illness, and that the War on Drugs...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 1:12 PM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Over at the wonderful World's Fair, Ben Cohen has an interview with Kelly Joyce, author of the forthcoming Magnetic Appeal: MRI and the Myth of Transparency. Here is how Joyce summarizes the main argument of her book: In the United...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:24 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 22, 2008
Crazy stuff, courtesy of John Tierney: The natural impulse to stop holding your breath (typically within 30 seconds or a minute) is not because of an oxygen shortage but because of the painful buildup of carbon dioxide. Mr. Blaine said...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 9:53 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Is this chart surprising? I was an Arts (English) and Psychology (Neuroscience) major, so I clearly didn't choose the most lucrative fields. (And I contemplated a philosophy minor...) For me, the most surprising aspect of the chart (and it's still...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 9:46 AM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 21, 2008
Speaking of the senses, it's always fascinating what happens when that sensory spigot is turned off, so that the cortex is suddenly filled with silence. Jad Abumrad, the co-host of Radio Lab (download their new season!), recently spent some time...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 12:55 PM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
In honor of National Poetry Month, which always struck me as a very bizarre month (is poetry less essential in the other eleven months of the year? And why April?), I thought I'd post a selection of some poetry on...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:40 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 20, 2008
I've got a cockatiel with an inverted beak - it's a pretty funny looking underbite, but doesn't interfere with his eating - and I've often wondered if animals ever get self-conscious about their appearance. Does my cockatiel have any clue...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:55 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 17, 2008
Nicholas Kristof has an excellent column on rationalizing, partisan affiliation and the Clinton/Obama race: If you're a Democrat, your candidate won in Wednesday night's presidential debate -- that was obvious, and most neutral observers would recognize that. But the other...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 1:56 PM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
One of the odd things about blogs, at least for me, is that they encourage a really informal and oddly intimate relationship between the writer and reader. I feel like I really know my favorite bloggers, in a way that...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:49 AM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 16, 2008
For more than 30 years, it has been a truism of social science that, once our basic needs are met, money doesn't buy happiness, or even upgrade despair. In one well-known survey, people on the Forbes 100 list of the...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:29 AM • 9 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 15, 2008
It's a joke I've heard many times from neuroscientists who use monkeys in their research: "There are all these regulations about the treatment of primates, but there are no regulations governing the treatment of post-docs". (Of course, we don't record...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 11:29 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Over at Freakonomics, they invited several prominent thinkers to weigh in on a rather lofty question: How much progress have psychology and psychiatry really made? The answers are mostly interesting, with nearly everyone agreeing that the sciences of the mind...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 9:31 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 14, 2008
Raymond Tallis recently launched a broadside against the nascent field of neuroaesthetics, especially as applied to literature: A generation of academic literary critics has now arisen who invoke "neuroscience" to assist them in their work of explication, interpretation and appreciation....
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:12 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
When I mutter about the fourth culture, about the possibility of bridging the cultural chasms separating art and science, I should make it clear that I'm not talking about stuff like this. In fact, I think there's something mildly offensive...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 9:46 AM • 9 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 11, 2008
A recent scene at the Bronx Zoo gorilla exhibit: On the left side of the enclosure, standing five feet away from the glass wall separating man and animal, is a big male gorilla. He crosses his arms as he gazes...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 2:12 PM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 9, 2008
A great comment by Joel Kahn, who argues that we need a new science of human interaction, able to study what Durkheim referred to as "the conscience collective": Durkheim was obviously not the first to advance a notion of mind...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 8:50 AM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 8, 2008
For those who might be interested (hi mom!): I'll be on the Leonard Lopate show on WNYC show early this afternoon, around 1 pm. I'll be talking about veal stock, glutamic acid and umami, so I suggest that you eat...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 4:38 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 7, 2008
Here's Junot Diaz, talking about his writing process: It was an incredibly difficult struggle. I tell a lot of young people I work with that nothing should be more inspirational than my dumb ass. It took me 11 years to...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 11:59 AM • 12 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 6, 2008
It seems that you can't go to a chic restaurant nowadays without encountering octopus on the menu. Like its cephalopod cousins, octotpus is best cooked according to the "two-minute or two-hour" rule. You can either grill the octopus quickly, imbuing...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 11:52 AM • 10 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 4, 2008
Sorry for the light posting - I've been flitting about, spending way too much time in airports. (My carbon footprint is a constant source of guilt.) I've recently spent a lot of time hanging around various universities, which always reminds...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 4:59 PM • 10 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 2, 2008
I've been remiss in not linking to Benjamin Cohen's incredibly interesting series of posts on scientific objectivity. The mere fact that objectivity *has* a history is revealing. It's more typical that the timeless, ahuman connotation of "objectivity" renders it the...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:46 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
There's no shortage of books on neurological patients with brain injuries, but Head Cases, the new book by Michael Paul Mason, is one of my recent favorites. (See here for the Times review.) Mason brings a unique perspective to the...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 9:57 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
