Now on ScienceBlogs: Book Review: Don't be SUCH a Scientist
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.
May 29, 2009
Apologies for the radio silence - I've been traveling and away from a reliable internet connection. (Taking a break from Google is one of the true pleasures of travel. I'm afraid, however, that it's an endangered pleasure, like train travel....
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 8:05 AM • 11 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
May 22, 2009
Over at the New Yorker website, I've answered a few questions from readers about the marshmallow task: Do you think the future results of success would be different for a sample of kids born in the twenty-first century considering the...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:41 AM • 19 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
May 20, 2009
The Economist summarizes a new study looking at the link between living abroad and increased creativity: Anecdotal evidence has long held that creativity in artists and writers can be associated with living in foreign parts. Rudyard Kipling, Pablo Picasso, Ernest...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 9:50 AM • 23 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
May 19, 2009
Robert Krulwich has a fascinating piece on NPR about the binding problem and the speed of nerve transmission. In essence, it takes a split-second longer for sensory signals to reach the brains of tall people, which means that their "now"...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 6:12 AM • 25 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
May 16, 2009
Matthew Yglesias advocates for the free movement of sports franchises, so that they can hop from city to city with ease and thus follow the movement of population: Right now, the New York City Designated media area contains 6.5 percent...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 4:39 PM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
May 15, 2009
An interesting new study on mind-wandering and the default network was recently published in PNAS. The scientists, led by Kalina Christoff of UBC and Jonathan Schooler of UCSB, used "experience sampling" in an fMRI machine to capture the moment of...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 9:46 AM • 11 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
May 14, 2009
One question that came up yesterday during the radio show was whether or not Americans can learn, once again, to delay gratification and save money. Can we get back the thriftiness of earlier generations? Or are we destined to be...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 2:35 PM • 8 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
1) The Macrophenomenal Pro Basketball Almanac, by Freedarko. This book is perpetually on my coffee table, if only so I can read through it (again and again) every time there's a commercial break during the NBA playoffs. It's a really...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 8:15 AM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
May 13, 2009
I was on On Point today with Walter Mischel, the subject of my recent New Yorker article. As usual, he was incredibly eloquent. One thing we both got a chance to emphasize was the plasticity of personality - as I...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 2:16 PM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
I've got a short column for the Seed website on the neuroscience of improvisation. I begin with one of my favorite stories of improv, which is Al Kooper's organ playing during the studio sessions for "Like A Rolling Stone": Al...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 6:48 AM • 11 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Tim Lambert 11.22.2009
PZ Myers 11.22.2009
PZ Myers 11.19.2009
Ed Brayton 11.22.2009
Ed Brayton 11.19.2009
