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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.
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 • 0 TrackBacks
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 • 0 TrackBacks
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 • 0 TrackBacks
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 • 0 TrackBacks
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 • 0 TrackBacks
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 • 0 TrackBacks
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 • 0 TrackBacks
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 • 18 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
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 • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
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 • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
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