Now on ScienceBlogs: Let the War on Christmas Begin. Atheist style.
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.
April 30, 2009
There's no way in hell I deserve to be on the stage at this incredible event, but I'm so honored to be included: Yo-Yo Ma performs the world premiere of Self Comes to Mind, a musical composition by Bruce Adolphe,...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 9:08 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Over at Mind Hacks, Vaughan finds a fascinating review of recent books on the history of the senses. He highlights a short section of medieval theories of perception, which hypothesized that the eyes actively sent out "rays" that illuminated what...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 7:22 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 29, 2009
Margaret Talbot has a thorough and thought-provoking article in the New Yorker on the potential pitfalls of "neuroenhancing drugs". At this point, enhancement essentially consists of taking uppers (Adderall, Ritalin, Provigil, etc.) to improve concentration and focus. These drugs might...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 7:28 AM • 24 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 27, 2009
Here's a fascinating new study demonstrating that it's good to get exposed to multiple languages even as a preverbal infant: Children exposed to bilingual input typically learn 2 languages without obvious difficulties. However, it is unclear how preverbal infants cope...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 8:30 AM • 9 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 26, 2009
My latest article for the Boston Globe Ideas section is now online. This piece was inspired by my brand new beautiful nephew, Jude Lehrer - may this blog post increase your Google presence! What is it like to be a...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:51 AM • 18 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 25, 2009
Just when you thought people couldn't get any sillier or more confused, psychologists uncover yet another innate foible. This one is called "choice blindness," and it refers to the ways in which people are utterly blind to their own choices...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 9:27 AM • 17 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 23, 2009
I've always been fascinated by traffic. (I grew up in LA, so I had plenty of time to indulge my interest.) City streets are a complex system in which seemingly insignificant changes - a broken street light, a stalled car,...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 6:47 AM • 14 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 22, 2009
I was doing my grocery shopping yesterday when I stumbled upon a discount that I assumed was a clerical mistake: some fancy olive oil had been reduced from $23 to $9. Needless to say, I immediately put a bottle in...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 7:26 AM • 24 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 21, 2009
I've got a new article in the latest issue of Wired, guest-edited by J.J. Abrams. It's quite an excellent issue, I think, although I'm still utterly befuddled by the hidden puzzles on the glossy pages. My article is an investigation...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 2:54 PM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 20, 2009
Virginia Heffernan, writing in the Times magazine, takes Bruce Sterling's SXSW talk about connectivity and poverty mainstream: Bruce Sterling, the cyberpunk writer, proposed at the South by Southwest tech conference in Austin that the clearest symbol of poverty is dependence...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 11:58 AM • 10 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
