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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.
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 • 4 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 • 12 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 • 20 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 • 5 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
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