August 26, 2008
The latest Men's Vogue has a rather interesting article (not online) by Jay McInerney on a small group of real estate moguls who like to drink very, very expensive wine. For these oenophiles, a 1982 Romanee-Conti is a young wine...
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Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 1:41 PM • 17 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Once upon a time, back when the Human Genome Project threatened to unravel the mystery of human nature - every aspect of individuality would be reduced to a SNIP - the Nature/Nurture debate seemed like the most hotly contested question...
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Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:16 AM • 12 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
August 21, 2008
I've often suspected (based on a highly unsystematic series of conversations with classic New Hampshire independents) that most undecided voters are really just low-information voters, who have actually made a decision but don't quite know how to explain their decision....
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Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 4:53 PM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Over at Neurophilosophy, Mo highlights one of my favorite William James quotes: The stream of thought flows on; but most of its segments fall into the bottomless abyss of oblivion. Of some, no memory survives the instant of their passage....
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Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 2:19 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
August 20, 2008
Here's Seth Godin: A journalist asked me, Most people have a better standard of living today than Louis XIV did in his day. So why are so many people unhappy? What you have doesn't make you unhappy. What you want...
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Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 12:47 PM • 11 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Over at Mind Matters, we've got an interesting article on how believing in free will can affect our ethical behavior: In a clever new study, psychologists Kathleen Vohs at the University of Minnesota and Jonathan Schooler at the University of...
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Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:55 AM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
August 19, 2008
I had an article this weekend in the Washington Post looking at the recent spate of "age defiance" - Dara Torres, Madonna, John McCain, etc. - and some recent neuroscience research: A s a 27-year old science writer who still...
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Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 11:56 AM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
August 18, 2008
John McCain remarked last week that the hostilities in Georgia marked the "first serious crisis" since the end of the Cold War. His surrogates on the news shows have expanded on that position, as they repeat the talking point about...
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Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 1:18 PM • 8 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
The paperback version of my first book, Proust Was A Neuroscientist, is now shipping from Amazon. Needless to say, everyone should buy the book in triplicate. I'd apologize for the self-promotion, but isn't blogging just one big orgy of self-promotion?...
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Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 12:36 PM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
My latest article for the Boston Globe Ideas section looks at some recent criticisms of fMRI, at least when it's misused: The brain scan image - a silhouette of the skull, highlighted with bright splotches of primary color - has...
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Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 9:59 AM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks