Now on ScienceBlogs: And so, driven on ceaselessly toward new shores
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.
December 30, 2008
I'll have more to say about cities and the brain in the coming days, but I thought it was worth highlighting this thoughtful post by the economist Edward Glaeser on how NYC is "America's most resilient city": When other cities,...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 1:49 PM • 9 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
I've written before about the the failure of basic neuroscience research to advance neuropharmacology (at least, it's been a failure so far), but it's nice to see Eric Kandel, my old mentor (and one of my scientific heroes), make the...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 9:17 AM • 400 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
December 24, 2008
Oliver Morton has a lyrical and thoughtful op-ed today in the Times, in which he re-interprets the famous images of Planet earth seen from space: They came for the Moon, and for the first three orbits it was to the...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 11:45 AM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
December 22, 2008
Tonight is the first night of Hanukkah, which is, as Adam Sandler has correctly noted, a rather unsatisfying holiday. It's typically sold to impressionable Jewish kids as being better than Christmas, since there are eight days of presents, and not...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:42 AM • 21 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Brian Knutson, a very clever neuroeconomist at Stanford, sheds light on some of the cognitive biases currently holding back the economy over at Edge.org. From the perspective of the brain, uncertainty is hell: The brain responds to uncertain future outcomes...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:24 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
December 19, 2008
Over at the Daily Beast, Alexandra Penney describes what it feels like to lose all of your money to a Wall Street Ponzi scheme: Last Thursday at around 5 p.m., I had just checked on a rising cheese soufflé in...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:55 AM • 16 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Last week, Nature published an editorial arguing for the mainstream acceptance of "cognitive enhancing drugs": Today, on university campuses around the world, students are striking deals to buy and sell prescription drugs such as Adderall and Ritalin -- not to...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:07 AM • 12 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
December 16, 2008
When people ask for me tangible examples of how art and science can work together to discover new things - that's a theme of my first book - the first thing I mention is food. In recent years, chefs like...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:49 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
December 15, 2008
I find the epic Ponzi scheme of Bernard Madoff morbidly fascinating. He managed to lose 50 billion dollars, which can't be easy: A busy stock-trading operation occupied the 19th floor, and the computers and paperwork of Bernard L. Madoff Investment...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 9:59 AM • 14 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
December 14, 2008
Deborah Solomon and the Times Magazine were kind enough to ask me a few questions about my new book, How We Decide. You can read the interview here. And yes, I'm jumping in the photo....
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 8:23 AM • 12 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
