Jonah Lehrer is an editor at large for Seed Magazine. His first book is Proust Was A Neuroscientist. Buy it here.
October 30, 2008
Over at Mind Hacks, Vaughan discusses a fascinating new paper on how psychotic delusions take on different manifestations over time: A Slovenian research team, led by psychiatrist Borut Skodlar, discovered that the Ljubljana psychiatric hospital had patient records going as...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 7:18 AM • 4 Comments •
October 28, 2008
You know what I think about when I hear about the epic failure of all these fancy financial models that were designed to calculate risk? I think about the Atlantic Cod. These fish used to be everywhere. (Once upon a...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 8:59 AM • 21 Comments •
Comes courtesy of David Brooks: This [financial[ meltdown is not just a financial event, but also a cultural one. It's a big, whopping reminder that the human mind is continually trying to perceive things that aren't true, and not perceiving...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 8:48 AM • 2 Comments •
October 27, 2008
There's something poignant about the possibility that one of the reasons obese people eat too much is because they are unable to take pleasure in the taste of their food. But according to a new study published in Science, that's...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:31 AM • 9 Comments •
Last week, I reviewed Buyology, a new book on neuromarketing, in the Washington Post. Although the book is based on a large, privately funded neuromarketing experiment, I wasn't so wowed by the science: If "Buy-ology" itself is any indication, these...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 8:54 AM • 11 Comments •
October 25, 2008
Click here to hear the only known recording of Virginia Woolf's voice. A few thoughts: 1) What an Oxbridge accent! So posh and crisp. This is the voice I always imagined for Mrs. Dalloway, but then I guess Woolf had...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 11:39 AM • 3 Comments •
October 24, 2008
Over at Mind Matters, I've got an interview with Sheldon Solomon. We talk about fear, death, the fear of death, and politics. In this excerpt, Solomon describes an extremely clever experiment, in which he primed judges to think about death...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 7:36 AM • 0 Comments •
October 23, 2008
There's a new scientific appreciation for the importance of self-control. This trend began with Walter Mischel's astonishing marshmallow experiments, in which the ability of a four-year old to resist the temptation of a second marshmallow turned out to be a...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 12:37 PM • 11 Comments •
Apologies for the radio silence - I've been on vacation. This time, I actually tried to stay away from the internet while away. My online withdrawal period actually went though several distinct psychological stages. (And yes, I know such stages...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 9:59 AM • 6 Comments •
October 21, 2008
Richard Powers, one of my favorite novelists, just got his entire genome sequenced and wrote about the results for GQ: I come from a long line of folks, on my mother's side, with congenital difficulty making choices. My father's family,...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:40 AM • 9 Comments •
October 20, 2008
Dashi, a Japanese stock made from kelp and dried fish, is going mainstream. It's suddenly appearing on the menus of all sorts of fancy restaurants, many of which have little to do with Japanese food. The reason? Umami. "It's basically...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 7:59 AM • 11 Comments •
October 16, 2008
Another way that credit cards dupe the brain into spending way too much money on interest payments: New research by the University of Warwick reveals that many credit card customers become fixated on the level of minimum payments given on...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 8:22 PM • 5 Comments •
October 13, 2008
Michael Pollan makes so much sense it's actually a little painful, since such basic agricultural reforms will never, ever get through Congress. At some point in the twentieth century, American lawmakers forgot that the sole goal of farming wasn't efficiency;...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:12 PM • 16 Comments •
Over at Mind Matters, I've got an interview with Dr. Robert Burton on the danger of certainty and its relevance during a presidential election: LEHRER: To what extent does the certainty bias come into play during a presidential election? It...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 9:26 PM • 4 Comments •
October 9, 2008
At any given moment, the cortex is riven by disagreement, as rival bits of tissue contradict each other. Different brain areas think different things for different reasons; all those mental components stuffed inside our head are constantly fighting for influence...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 6:00 PM • 5 Comments •
October 7, 2008
A fundamental problem in the financial markets right now - a problem that's often traced to the failure of Lehman Brothers last month - is the breakdown of trust. Because financial institutions don't "trust" the solvency of other institutions and...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 7:48 AM • 5 Comments •
October 6, 2008
I'm pretty sure that if Dante had known about locked-in syndrome he would have rewritten the chapter in the Inferno devoted to the ninth circle of hell. In the most recent Esquire, Joshua Foer has an excellent profile of Erik...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 9:49 AM • 8 Comments •
My latest article in the Boston Globe Ideas section is on presidential decision-making and the virtues of metacognition, or being able to think about thinking: For the last eight years, America has had a president with an audacious approach to...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 9:37 AM • 7 Comments •
October 4, 2008
Last night, while stuck in an airport (the inevitable delay), I decided to get a Wendy's milkshake. Not a particularly noteworthy decision - when traveling, I like to subsist entirely on fast food - but it occurred to me, while...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 9:52 AM • 8 Comments •
October 2, 2008
One of the enduring mysteries of neurogenesis - the process of creating new neurons in the brain - is the purpose of all these new cells. After all, one of the reasons scientists believed that neurogenesis didn't exist (this was...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 8:42 AM • 4 Comments •
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