Jonah Lehrer is an editor at large for Seed Magazine. His first book is Proust Was A Neuroscientist. Buy it here.
June 30, 2008
I've written before about the dangers of transparency and medical technology, at least when it comes to diagnosing back pain. Simply put, doctors tend to assume that any imaging technology with better resolution will lead to better diagnoses. But that's...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 3:27 PM • 1 Comments •
This makes me feel very lonely: The "Pillars of Creation" may be the most iconic Hubble photograph ever taken. "Located in the Eagle Nebula, the pillars are clouds of molecular hydrogen, light years in length, where new stars are being...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:53 AM • 16 Comments •
June 27, 2008
Somewhere, Walt Whitman is smiling: From "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry": FLOOD-TIDE below me! I watch you face to face; Clouds of the west! sun there half an hour high! I see you also face to face. Crowds of men and women...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 2:55 PM • 0 Comments •
Language is the stuff of thought. I'm reminded of this truism every time I sip a glass of wine and some pretentious snob (usually me) insists on saying something about the Chianti Classico smelling like cherries, or how the New...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 12:15 PM • 3 Comments •
June 26, 2008
There's an interesting review on prediction errors and temporal difference learning theory in the latest Trends in Cognitive Sciences. (Really, it's fascinating stuff.) But I don't want to talk today about the content of the article. Instead, I want to...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:40 AM • 9 Comments •
June 25, 2008
Here are three food-related items I've been enjoying lately: 1) Fennel Pollen: Like all great spices, the flavor of wild fennel pollen eludes adjectives. It's like a fennel seed, only much more so. I sprinkle it on everything from roasted...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 1:59 PM • 2 Comments •
This is the car I covet: It's been a long day for our adorable yellow test car. This morning we headed for Think's factory in Aurskog, some 40 miles into the bluegrass Scandinavian countryside, with about an 85% charge in...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 11:16 AM • 8 Comments •
If William James were alive today, I'm pretty sure that he'd be an experimental philosopher. (He'd also be a cognitive psychologist, a public intellectual in the mold of Richard Rorty and a damn fine essayist, filling the back pages of...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:46 AM • 15 Comments •
June 24, 2008
I was on the Takeaway last week talking about this study: We examined the role of serotonin transporter (5-HTT) and oxytocin receptor (OXTR) genes in explaining differences in sensitive parenting in a community sample of 159 Caucasian, middle-class mothers with...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:47 AM • 6 Comments •
In a recent issue of Nature, Nikos Logothetis, director of the Max Plank Institute for Biological Cybernetics, wrote some surprisingly harsh sentences about the experimental limitations of fMRI. The piece is especially noteworthy because Logothetis has probably done more than...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 9:59 AM • 3 Comments •
June 23, 2008
There are a few writers who manage to trigger a contradictory mixture of feelings in me: the joy of reading their prose is fused with the mild anguish of not having written their prose. It's one part status anxiety, a...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 11:59 AM • 0 Comments •
Robert Krulwich, speaking at the Caltech Commencement, issues a cri de coeur for the importance of stories, even (especially!) when speaking about science: Because talking about science, telling science stories to regular folks like me and your parents, is not...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 11:40 AM • 4 Comments •
June 19, 2008
It's a truism that the favorite philosopher of every scientist is Karl Popper. (In my own experience, this truism is mostly true.) Popper, or so the story goes, stood up for empirical fact when the post-modernists were descending into Deleuze...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 11:40 AM • 13 Comments •
June 18, 2008
From Rachel Herz's quite interesting The Scent of Desire: In one study that contrasted the trauma of being blinded or becoming anosmic [losing you sense of smell] after an accident, it was found that those who were blinded initially felt...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 6:59 AM • 3 Comments •
June 17, 2008
Like so many golf fans, I'd never even thought about watching golf on television until Tiger Woods. I don't play the game and the images of all those manicured greens and hushed crowds always struck me as incredibly boring. Why...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 11:14 AM • 11 Comments •
I really enjoyed The Death of Vishnu when it came out several years ago. It was a Calvinoesque exploration of a single Bombay apartment dwelling, as refracted through the prism of a dying peasant. But I had no idea that...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 9:52 AM • 1 Comments •
June 16, 2008
When I first got a Prius, I was tempted to cover the rear bumper with liberal decals, like "Support Local Farms!" (that's on my bike) or "Women for Obama!" (a popular Prius sticker here in New Hampshire). I wanted to...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 1:29 PM • 9 Comments •
M. Night Shyamalan, the director of the vaguely anti-evolution (and thoroughly mediocre) film The Happening, uses the brain to discuss the limits of science: There's so much unexplained stuff. I don't quite understand the scientific explanation of the placebo effect....
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:24 AM • 14 Comments •
June 13, 2008
It happens to me every time: I tell myself that it's just a game, that these overpaid basketball superstars don't really have any loyalty to a particular team, place, city, etc., that I really shouldn't care about the outcome of...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 11:11 AM • 13 Comments •
June 12, 2008
At first glance, it's hard to think of a more frivolous form of culture than the daily soap opera. It's pure and delicious escapism. And yet, at least in Brazil, soap operas have powerfully influenced family planning, according to a...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 1:29 PM • 2 Comments •
Bookslut has a really interesting interview with Jeff Warren, author of The Head Trip: Q: It turns out sleep is more interesting than we usually expect -- and that it even has a history! What are some key misconceptions about...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 1:16 PM • 4 Comments •
Over at Marginal Revolution, a commenter asks Tyler a great question: I wanted to ask for survival tips in case I am unexpectedly transported to a random location in Europe (say for instance current France/Benelux/Germany) in the year 1000 AD...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:11 AM • 3 Comments •
June 11, 2008
I wandered into the ICP a few weeks ago, wandering amid Midtown with an hour to spare. I ended up transfixed by an exhibit called Bill Wood's Business: The Bill Wood Photo Company supplied local snap shooters and amateur photographers...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 11:53 AM • 5 Comments •
In the latest Atlantic, John Staddon, a professor of psychology at Duke, has an article on the dangers of road signs and speed limits: The American system of traffic control, with its many signs and stops, and with its specific...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:56 AM • 11 Comments •
A few weeks ago, I wrote an article on various explanations for home field advantage. One of the more interesting tidbits I learned was this: Professional teams, however, seem to be better adjusted to life on the road. (The chartered...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 8:20 AM • 1 Comments •
June 10, 2008
David Brooks' column today is filled with some depressing financial facts: Between 1989 and 2001, credit-card debt nearly tripled, soaring from $238 billion to $692 billion. By last year, it was up to $937 billion, the report said. State governments...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:23 AM • 15 Comments •
June 9, 2008
An eloquent elegy to age, written by Steven Johnson on his fortieth birthday: One of the things that's always stuck with me from my Mind Wide Open research is that human beings vary predictably in their perception of time as...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 11:43 AM • 1 Comments •
Given the weather on the Eastern seaboard - it's one of those hot, sultry days where you wait for a thunderstorm to purge the humidity from the air - I decided to do a quick literature search for the effects...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 11:13 AM • 2 Comments •
June 7, 2008
Dave Munger has a great post on how fMRI images bias the brain. The researchers asked 156 students at Colorado State University to evaluate three different summaries of brain research. As you can probably guess (especially if you're familiar with...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 12:43 PM • 7 Comments •
June 6, 2008
Kottke links to some early reviews of cinema. Needless to say, hyperbole ruled the day. As one critic proclaimed: Photography has ceased to record immobility. It perpetuates the image of movement. When these gadgets are in the hands of the...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 11:29 AM • 2 Comments •
Humans are exquisitely social animals, and yet we're vulnerable to some pretty stunning flaws in social cognition. Unfortunately, most of these flaws are on full display during a presidential campaign. Consider the false rumor, which can influence our beliefs even...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:59 AM • 5 Comments •
June 5, 2008
It's been recognized for a few years that drinking diet sodas can actually cause weight gain, since the phony sweetness of artificial sweeteners disrupts the "predictive relationship" between a sweet taste and caloric satisfaction. In other words, people drink a...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 1:54 PM • 14 Comments •
Allegra Goodman is a marvelous writer. Intuition, her last novel, was an uncannily accurate depiction of the slog of a science lab. It captured the epic tedium of empiricism, the way experiments are ambiguous even when they work. (And they...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 12:45 PM • 2 Comments •
June 4, 2008
Sometimes, when I walk through international airports, I get a little sad about the homogeneity of homo sapiens. I guess it's an inevitable by-product of globalization and modernity, but I can't help but wish that we didn't all drink Starbucks...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 5:43 PM • 5 Comments •
Last year, some drunken teens decided to trash the house of Robert Frost. The teens are now being required by a judge to take poetry classes focusing on the verse of Frost: Using "The Road Not Taken" and another poem...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 3:55 PM • 3 Comments •
Or so I say on the Bryant Park Project. We talk about tip-of-the-tongue moments, metacognition and why seeing a picture of a motorcycle will make you think about biopsies....
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 8:56 AM • 0 Comments •
Over at Neurophilosophy, Mo has an excellent summary of a drug in Phase II clinical trials that tries to treat depression by up-regulating neurogenesis. In other words, it wants to ease your sadness by giving you more new brain cells....
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 8:51 AM • 10 Comments •
June 3, 2008
The latest Wired features a list of contrarian environmental facts (organically raised cattle emit more methane gas than conventionally raised cattle, nuclear power is great, the Prius battery takes a lot of energy to make, etc.) but I was most...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 3:29 PM • 13 Comments •
Is your right parahippocampal gyrus feeling a little tired? Then maybe you should stop being such a sarcastic smart ass. It turns out that this obscure brain area, tucked deep inside the right hemisphere, is largely responsible for the detection...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:25 AM • 6 Comments •
June 2, 2008
What psychological phenomenon do you believe in but cannot prove? I'd have to go with birth order. Having grown up with three siblings, I can't help but be convinced that my birth order (I'm the second oldest) has had a...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 11:34 AM • 9 Comments •
I've got an article in the Boston Globe Ideas section on a phenomenon that's always fascinated me: the tip-of-the-tongue moment. Late in 1988, a 41-year-old Italian hardware clerk arrived in his doctor's office with a bizarre complaint. Although he could...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 9:59 AM • 11 Comments •
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