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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.
March 31, 2009
An inspired metaphor for the inherent instability of the brain by Moshe Bar: The fighter plane F-16 is the first aeroplane intentionally designed to have an aerodynamically unstable platform. This design was chosen to enhance the aircraft's manoeuvrability. Most aeroplanes...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 8:49 AM • 8 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
March 30, 2009
Wired has now put more photos from my article on the Allen Brain Atlas online. They're grotesquely gorgeous: While the Allen Atlas of gene expression has already proven itself to be a valuable research tool, I think the project's most...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 5:51 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
My short post on breast-feeding from a few days ago (inspired by this article by Hanna Rosin) has inspired a lot of dissenting email. Since comments are still disabled - I hope to have them back soon, though - I...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 8:22 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
March 28, 2009
A quick note: I'll be giving my stump speech at the Dartmouth Bookstore in Hanover, NH tomorrow (3/29) at 3 PM....
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 9:55 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
In the latest Atlantic, Hanna Rosin has a very interesting article/manifesto that rails against the "cult of breast-feeding": The medical literature [on breast-feeding] shows that breast-feeding is probably, maybe, a little better; but it is far from the stampede of...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 9:45 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
March 26, 2009
Nicholas Kristof has a great column today on Philip Tetlock and political experts, who turn out to be astonishingly bad at making accurate predictions: The expert on experts is Philip Tetlock, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. His...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 4:08 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Over at Salon, there's a quite interesting interview with UC-Berkeley philosopher Alva Noe, author of Out of Our Heads. (I reviewed the book in the SF Chronicle last month.) Q: Maybe I'm naive but it seems kind of obvious that...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:18 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
March 25, 2009
Here's another common question I get at my book talks: "Is there a difference between the male and female brain when it comes to decision-making? Are women really more intuitive? Which sex is the better decider?" While there are certainly...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:20 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
March 24, 2009
Here's Joseph Brodsky (via Kottke), praising boredom: A substantial part of what lies ahead of you is going to be claimed by boredom. The reason I'd like to talk to you about it today, on this lofty occasion, is that...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:23 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
March 23, 2009
I've got a new feature in Wired Magazine on the Allen Brain Institute and their heroic attempts to construct a gene expression map of the human brain. I was most impressed by the way the Institute has "industrialized" the scientific...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 6:57 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
PZ Myers 11.07.2009
PZ Myers 11.07.2009
Orac 11.06.2009
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Greg Laden 11.07.2009
