Official Comment Count: 1,033,233
Jonah Lehrer is an editor at large for Seed Magazine. His first book is Proust Was A Neuroscientist. Buy it here.
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 • 13 Comments •
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 •
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 •
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 •
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 •
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 •
July 28, 2008
Vegan sausages don't taste that bad.
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:49 AM • 32 Comments •
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 • 10 Comments •
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 •
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 •
July 23, 2008
Funny stuff from McSweeney's: General relativity is your high-school girlfriend all grown up. Man, she is amazing. You sort of regret not keeping in touch. She hates quantum mechanics for obscure reasons. Cosmology is the girl that doesn't really date,...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 12:26 PM • 37 Comments •
Over at Mind Matters, the expert blog I curate at Scientific American, we're currently featuring a really interesting article by On Amir on the cognitive cost of making decisions: For instance, it's long been recognized that strenuous cognitive tasks--such as...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:31 AM • 6 Comments •
Look up charming in a dictionary and I'm pretty sure you'll see this video: Because we like to link everything to the brain over here at the Frontal Cortex, it's worth mentioning that the number four also represents the outer...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 8:16 AM • 3 Comments •
July 22, 2008
This kid is a poster child for deliberate practice: Marc Yu, a 9-year-old piano prodigy from Pasadena, Calif., recently played at a benefit for victims of the earthquake in Sichuan, China. And he didn't play "Row, Row, Row Your Boat."...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:16 AM • 13 Comments •
I've got an article in the latest New Yorker (not online) on the neuroscience of insight. I begin the article with the harrowing story of Wag Dodge and the Mann Gulch fire, before describing the research of Mark Jung Beeman,...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 9:58 AM • 9 Comments •
July 21, 2008
David Carr, a media columnist for the New York Times, was addicted to crack for several years in the late 1980's. In the Times Magazine (and in his new book) he tells the story of his own investigation into his...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:43 AM • 4 Comments •
July 18, 2008
Whenever I happen to watch some talking heads on a cable news channel - usually while stuck in an airport - I'm always impressed by how mistaken the basic premise of the conversation is. The pundits will waste lots of...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 5:59 PM • 11 Comments •
I visited the Cambridge Google offices last month and talked about Escoffier, umami, Kanye West and the plasticity of dopamine neurons:...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:32 AM • 6 Comments •
July 17, 2008
Speaking of data visualization, a reader sent along this link to some fabulous examples. Each of these images, according to artist and creator Jason Salavon, is composed of "100 unique commemorative photographs culled from the internet. The final compositions are...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 11:59 AM • 2 Comments •
One way to understand the collapse of the real estate bubble (and our current financial mess) is as a massive case of bad decision-making. The mistakes, of course, were made by many different people and organizations: the investment banks who...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:49 AM • 27 Comments •
July 16, 2008
Steven Levitt writes about the difficulty of judging wine: On Tuesday afternoons we had wine tastings. I asked if I could be allowed the opportunity to conduct one of these wine tastings "blind" to see what we could learn from...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 2:58 PM • 10 Comments •
Olivia Judson believes that it's time to jettison "Darwinism" from our vocabulary: Why is this [Darwinism] a problem? Because it's all grossly misleading. It suggests that Darwin was the beginning and the end, the alpha and omega, of evolutionary biology,...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:53 AM • 7 Comments •
This is a fourth culture I can believe in: Google has a lot more on how the video was made using 64 rotating lasers (no cameras!) and some cool data visualization programs. (They also released the raw data for the...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 9:59 AM • 3 Comments •
July 15, 2008
What you need is a distraction from the drip of bad economic news. (Just remember: the stock market is a random walk that, over the long-term, has an upward slope. Besides, investors who do nothing to their stock portfolio -...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 1:48 PM • 3 Comments •
Hit songs are getting wordier: Average word count of top-ten songs during the 1960s: 176 Average last year: 436 That's from the latest Harper's Index, via Marginal Revolution. I think this trend is pretty clearly a result of hip-hop and...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 9:59 AM • 5 Comments •
July 14, 2008
Why do poor people spend so much money on brand-name items and flashy status symbols? The answer is power. Those Calvin Klein boxers are a desperate attempt at compensation. Here's Kevin Lewis of the Globe Ideas section: If people low...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 11:49 AM • 3 Comments •
I loved WALL-E. In my opinion, it's the best Pixar movie yet, and I was a huge fan of Ratatouille. While the movie has an obvious environmental subtext - we are destroying the earth with our love of disposable things...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 11:10 AM • 8 Comments •
July 11, 2008
The latest Seed has a very interesting article on the complicated geometry underlying Western music, and the intuitive mathematical understanding demonstrated by composers: The shapes of the space of chords we have described also reveal deep connections between a wide...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:17 AM • 8 Comments •
July 10, 2008
Nature has a really interesting article on the sheer difficulty (impossibility?) of finding the genetic underpinnings of mental illness: Finding genes involved in psychiatric conditions is proving to be particularly intractable because it is still unclear whether the various diagnoses...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 11:56 AM • 7 Comments •
From the new experimental philosophy reader, edited by Joshua Knobe and Shaun Nichols: It used to be commonplace that the discipline of philosophy was deeply concerned with questions about the human condition. Philosophers thought about human beings and how their...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:53 AM • 6 Comments •
Is it just me or are the mosquitoes extra bad this year? I have a feeling that people would care even more about climate change if, instead of talking about rising sea levels, environmentalists started talking about swarms of mosquitoes....
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:21 AM • 4 Comments •
July 9, 2008
I don't know how I feel about this new trend of giving household pets human anti-depressants. Here's James Vlahos in the Times Magazine: The practice of prescribing medications designed for humans to animals has grown substantially over the past decade...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 2:50 PM • 12 Comments •
I've got a profile of ecologist Jianguo Liu in the latest Conservation Magazine: When the Wolong Nature Reserve was established in Southwestern China in 1975, it was hailed as a landmark achievement of the environmental movement. The reserve, which covers...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 1:58 PM • 0 Comments •
One of the biggest misconceptions of natural selection is that it mandates nastiness, that the pressure to survive and multiply requires a ruthless sort of amorality. In other words, we are all Hobbesian brutes, driven to survive by selfish genes....
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:17 AM • 3 Comments •
July 8, 2008
Some new evidence suggesting that children aren't such bundles of joy: Sociologists are discovering that children may not make parents happier and that childless adults, contrary to popular stereotypes, may often be more contented than people with kids. Parents "definitely...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 3:51 PM • 26 Comments •
Adam Gopnik has a great New Yorker article (not online) on the genius and wickedness of G.K. Chesterton. Although he wrote some masterful books - my favorites are The Man Who Was Thursday and the Father Brown detective stories -...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 1:47 PM • 4 Comments •
July 7, 2008
Steve Shapin, a historian of science at Harvard, argues that the romantic notion of scientists lusting after truth and not worldly riches is a wee bit oversimplified: IDEAS: Are we wrong to think of scientists as academics engaged in the...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 2:47 PM • 5 Comments •
This is a heartwarming story about the power of kindness to change behavior and rewire instinct. Michael Vick, the imprisoned QB, trained his dogs to be cruel, nasty and brutish. (The dogs that didn't take to fighting were beaten, tortured...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:31 AM • 10 Comments •
July 6, 2008
I've got an article in the Boston Globe Ideas section on the new science of depression: Prozac is one of the most successful drugs of all time. Since its introduction as an antidepressant more than 20 years ago, Prozac has...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 6:56 PM • 18 Comments •
July 4, 2008
You know what makes me proud to be an American? The fact that the black presidential candidate with the funny African-Muslim name is leading in the polls against the white aviator war hero married to a beer heiress. And I'm...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 11:33 AM • 11 Comments •
July 3, 2008
The ideological swings of scientists between age-groups is striking: What do you think explains this shift? And what other differences do you notice between young and old scientists? (I realize all such statements will be absurd over-generalizations, but that's the...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 11:57 AM • 16 Comments •
Zadie Smith, writing in The Believer, offers future novelists some advice: When you finish your novel, if money is not a desperate priority, if you do not need to sell it at once or be published that very second -...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 11:27 AM • 7 Comments •
July 2, 2008
The thrill I get from watching Michael Phelps swim is the same thrill I get from watching Tiger Woods put for birdie on the 18th hole or from reading 1930's Auden: the impossible isn't just made possible: these guys make...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 1:56 PM • 3 Comments •
This new article on the website of the NY Times listing "the 11 best foods you aren't eating" is a perfect example of nutritionism run amok, full of dubious claims like this: Pumpkin seeds: The most nutritious part of the...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:17 AM • 3 Comments •
July 1, 2008
An Onion classic: Is there no morality in science? Last night I tried to have a barbecue on my back patio and I ran inside before the spicy shish-kabobs were even half-grilled because of the mosquitoes. With all that chemical...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 1:48 PM • 8 Comments •
Another day, another sinking stock market. The Dow has officially entered bear territory, which is defined by a drop of 20 percent or more. Many variables are responsible for the financial malaise, from rising gas prices to a weakening job...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 1:22 PM • 6 Comments •
Why the field remains so necessary
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 9:59 AM • 2 Comments •
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