Now on ScienceBlogs: Let the War on Christmas being. 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.
August 31, 2009
I'll be filling in for Andrew Sullivan this week, so most of my blogging will be over there. I'll try to cross-post some of the meatier posts, like this one: The LA Times profiles the normalization of pot: After decades...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:27 AM • 24 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
August 27, 2009
Drake Bennett has an interesting and nuanced article in the Boston Globe Ideas section on money and happiness. To make a long story short, money can buy us some happiness, but only if we spend our money properly. Instead of...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 11:52 AM • 38 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
August 26, 2009
Why do people buy insurance? On the one hand, the act of purchasing insurance is an utterly rational act, dependent on the uniquely human ability to ponder counterfactuals in the distant future. What if my a fire destroyed my house?...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 2:31 PM • 27 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
August 25, 2009
I won't waste too many words trying to explain this stunning video, which is by Will Hoffman and the folks at Radio Lab. At first glance, it's a mere collection of ordinary moments - a falling teardrop, an escaped balloon,...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 12:33 PM • 28 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
August 24, 2009
In the LA Times, Megan Daum has an interesting reflection on the late comedy director John Hughes, and his eccentric cinematic representations of adolescence: If the brooding, solitary Andie played by Ringwald in "Pretty in Pink" were in high school...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 9:48 PM • 11 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Mirror neurons are a classic illustration of a scientific idea that's so elegant and intriguing our theories get ahead of the facts. They're an anatomical quirk rumored to solve so many different cognitive problems that one almost has to be...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 12:45 PM • 23 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
August 21, 2009
There's an excellent and thought-provoking column in the latest Nature, arguing that basic neuroscience research will be weaponized unless researchers are vigilant. It is, of course, a scary prospect to imagine: a fleet of biological and chemical weapons targeted at...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:42 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
August 20, 2009
The Netflix Prize will soon be over: it sounds as if the team "Bellkor Pragmatic Chaos" will be granted the million dollar prize, awarded for improving Netflix's own algorithm by more than 10 percent. As a heavy Netflix user, I...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 2:36 PM • 23 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
August 19, 2009
Alison Gopnik, a psychologist and philosopher at UC-Berkeley, has a wonderful op-ed over at the NY Times on the surprising intelligence of infants: New studies demonstrate that babies and very young children know, observe, explore, imagine and learn more than...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 3:35 PM • 8 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
August 18, 2009
Natalie Angier has an excellent column on the self-defeating feedback loop triggered by chronic stress. According to a new paper, when mice are chronically stressed, they end up reverting to habit and routine, even though these same habits are what...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 12:36 PM • 19 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
