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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.
July 31, 2008
A mule is a biological hybrid, an offspring of a male donkey and a female horse. According to a new paper, all of this cross-pollination has real benefits: mules are significantly smarter than either of their parents. No regression to...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:15 AM • 14 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
One of the lessons of my article on insight (based largely on this research) is that mind wandering isn't necessarily a bad thing, at least if you want to tap into the obscure associations prevalent in the right hemisphere: Schooler's...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 7:32 AM • 10 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
July 30, 2008
The devious slogan for the New York State lottery is "All you need is a dollar and a dream." Such state lotteries are a regressive form of taxation, since the vast majority of lottery consumers are low-income. As David Brooks...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 12:32 PM • 42 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Ed Yong has an excellent summary of a new experiment simulating the natural evolution of an artificial language as it's passed from one person to another. Every time we use a language we are subtly bending the rules and words...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 8:22 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
July 29, 2008
Sheena Iyengar has done some very cool studies on the debilitating effects of excessive choice. In one experiment, she ushered some undergraduates into a room with a variety of Godiva chocolates on a table. The students were then given vivid...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:39 AM • 25 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
I was on The Takeaway this morning talking about irrational voters, Peter Jennings and why trying to multi-task is like running Microsoft Vista on an old computer....
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 9:56 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
July 28, 2008
Vegan sausages don't taste that bad.
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:49 AM • 33 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
July 25, 2008
The latest report on home sales is bleak: Sales of new homes fell in June for the seventh time in the past eight months, more proof that the worst housing slump in decades is getting deeper. The Commerce Department reported...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 12:54 PM • 11 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
July 24, 2008
A new paper in one of my favorite journals, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, tries to reverse-engineer the tricks of magicians to learn about the blind spots of the brain. Wired Science explains: Magic tricks may look simple, but they exploit...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:53 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
John Donne, in this stanza from The Ecstasy, seems to anticipate the double helix: Our hands were firmly cemented By a fast balm which thence did spring Our eye-beams twisted, and did thread Our eyes upon one double string; So...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:13 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
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