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.
January 31, 2009
Over at the Economist, a number of economists have been speculating on the possibility of an economic "placebo" that would boost consumer confidence without actually triggering a massive spike in government spending. In other words, it would be a Keynsian...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 5:43 PM • 38 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
January 30, 2009
Melinda Wenner has an excellent article on the benefits of unstructured playtime - play without any rules - in the latest Sciam Mind. The article reminded me of that great Auden quote, which he adapted from Nietzsche: "Maturity - to...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 9:38 AM • 11 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
January 29, 2009
I've got an interview with Ed Vul, the lead author of the recent paper on "Voodoo Correlations in Social Neuroscience," over at Scientific American. Since the paper hit the web, it has provoked a flurry of rebuttals and responses. If...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 1:21 PM • 9 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
I've got a long article in Nature this week on Jeff Lichtman (of Brainbow fame) and the birth of connectomics, which seeks to construct a complete wiring diagram of the brain: At first glance, Jeff Lichtman seems to be hanging...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 8:37 AM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
January 28, 2009
Via Marginal Revolution, comes this interview with Warren Buffett, where he makes the case for the current stimulus package. I highlight this excerpt not to argue for the bill, but to highlight one of Buffett's many excellent mental habits, which...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 3:15 PM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Over at Mind Hacks, Vaughan has a typically wonderful post on the "maternal impression" theory, which suggested that a psychological trauma inflicted on the pregnant mother would lead to profound defects in the unborn child. As Vaughan notes, this crude...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 2:43 PM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
January 27, 2009
John Updike died today. He was one of my favorite writers, although I didn't fall in love with his work until I lived for a few years outside of America. It was then that I first read the complete Rabbit...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 2:57 PM • 10 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
January 26, 2009
The NY Times reports on a fascinating new study showing that Obama's election has improved the test scores of African Americans, at least in this one very small study which has yet to undergo peer-review: Now researchers have documented what...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 9:39 AM • 15 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
January 24, 2009
I've got a short column in the Wall Street Journal today where I recommend five books on human irrationality. I wanted to work in a novel too, but I soon realized that every novel is about irrational people. 1. Extraordinary...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 9:48 AM • 8 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
January 23, 2009
So far, my favorite response to the annual Brockman challenge - this year, the question was "What will change everything?" - comes from the physicist Stuart Kauffman: Reductionism has reigned as our dominant world view for 350 years in Western...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 7:34 AM • 15 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
