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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.
July 30, 2009
The Neurocritic has a fascinating summary of a recent paper investigating different types of memory in marathon runners. Why marathoners? Because completing a 26.2 mile race is an insanely arduous exercise, and leads to the massive release of stress hormones...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 7:10 AM • 14 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
July 29, 2009
Over at Mind Matters, there's a cool post by Fionnuala Butler and Cynthia Picketton on the benefits of watching television when lonely, which seems to provide the same sort of emotional relief as spending time with real people: For decades,...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 8:09 AM • 26 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
July 28, 2009
Over at the Times, Benedict Carey has a fascinating article on the crucial importance of intuition on the battlefield, where soldiers are often forced to make decisions without knowing why, exactly, they are making them: The United States military has...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 8:50 AM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
July 27, 2009
I've got an article in the Observer Sports Monthly on athletes and choking, which is adapted from my book: We call such failures "choking", if only because a person frayed by pressure might as well not have oxygen. What makes...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 7:15 AM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
July 24, 2009
Henry Markram, the director of the Blue Brain project, recently delivered a talk at TED that's gotten lots of press coverage. (It was the lead story on the BBC for a few hours...) Not surprisingly, all the coverage focused on...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 8:23 AM • 14 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
July 23, 2009
I've got a feature article in the latest Psychology Today on neuroaesthetics, the ambitious attempt to interpret art through the prism of neuroscience. Here's the beginning of the article: Consider the flightless fluffs of brown otherwise known as herring gull...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:52 AM • 9 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
July 22, 2009
Over at Mind Matters, we've just posted a very interesting article on creativity and distance, or why thinking something is farther away makes us more likely to solve difficult problems that require original answers: According to the construal level theory...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 12:46 PM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
July 21, 2009
A few days ago, I had my first McGriddle. While I usually try to avoid McDonald's meat products - that's the benevolent influence of my wife, who rightly insists on eating humanely raised animal products - I was stuck in...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 8:21 AM • 28 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
July 17, 2009
Over at Not Exactly Rocket Science, Ed Yong has a great summary of a new paper trying to figure out why information (at least in primates) can be just as rewarding as primal, biological rewards, such as calories and sex....
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 7:10 AM • 13 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
July 15, 2009
I've just begun Richard Holmes' latest work, The Age of Wonder, and it's as good as everyone says it is. The book is a history of late 18th century romantic science, filled with digressions into hot air balloons, Tahitian beaches...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 1:33 PM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
PZ Myers 11.07.2009
PZ Myers 11.07.2009
Orac 11.06.2009
Orac 11.05.2009
Greg Laden 11.07.2009
