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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.
September 30, 2008
Over the next few days, lots of people are going to be poring over their investment portfolio, trying to figure out which stocks to keep and which stocks to sell. Unfortunately, many of these investors will make the exact same...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 12:51 PM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
September 29, 2008
The hypocrisy is dazzling. Charles Murray (of Bell Curve fame) just wrote a book arguing that the vast majority of American college students shouldn't actually be attending college, since they lack the cognitive ability to "deal with college-level material." Instead,...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:44 AM • 33 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
September 25, 2008
I couldn't sleep last night. As far as I can tell, there was no particular reason for my insomnia. I wasn't stressed, or anxious, or caffeinated, or sick. My mind was tired, but my brain just wasn't in the sleeping...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 9:39 AM • 10 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
September 24, 2008
Walter Pater famously declared that "all art aspires to the condition of music." What he meant is that music is able to work on our feelings directly; no ideas interfere with its emotions. I'd amend that slightly, and say that...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 3:34 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
The power of Warren Buffett is impressive. He decides to invest a few billion in Goldman Sachs and panicked investors calm down. And why not? Nobody has an investing record that can even come close to comparing with Buffett's record:...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:57 AM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
A little housekeeping. First, I've got a new website! The best part is the article archive. I've also got a few speaking gigs in the next month, in case you happen to be in the area. On Friday, I'll be...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:56 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
September 23, 2008
Over at BLDGBLOG, Geoffrey makes an astute observation about how the latest consumer technologies have a way of becoming metaphors for the mind. Before the brain was a binary code running on three pounds of cellular microchips, it was an...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 12:57 PM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
This is interesting stuff. As G.K. Chesterton is said to have once said: "When people stop believing in God, they don't believe in nothing - they believe in anything." "What Americans Really Believe," a comprehensive new study released by Baylor...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:49 AM • 21 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
September 22, 2008
Last week, I had a short article in Play, the NY Times sports magazine. It was on how quarterbacks make decisions and why the Wonderlic is such a waste of time: Three and a half seconds: that's how long, on...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 11:12 AM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
I'm now officially the most annoying backseat driver ever. I was annoying before, but ever since I read Tom Vanderbilt's Traffic (a great book) I've turned into a Mr. Know It All, offering pearls of wisdom on everything from how...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:31 AM • 11 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
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