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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.
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 • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
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 • 30 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
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 • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
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 • 10 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
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 • 0 TrackBacks
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 • 0 TrackBacks
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 • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
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 • 13 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
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 • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
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 • 0 TrackBacks
Highly Allochthonous 11.05.2009
Eruptions 11.05.2009
Not Exactly Rocket Science 11.05.2009
Corpus Callosum 11.05.2009
Starts With a Bang 11.04.2009
