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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.
September 30, 2009
Over at Mind Matters, we've got a wonderful new column on the cognitive benefits of falling in love by Nira Liberman and Oren Shapira. It turns out that serious romance - but not short-sighted lust - leads us to think...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:38 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
September 29, 2009
Yesterday was Yom Kippur, the Jewish holiday of atonement. It's traditional to fast on Yom Kippur for all the usual religious reasons - not eating is a way to elevate the spirit and purify the mind (or so says the...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 5:40 PM • 9 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
September 28, 2009
In my essay on social networks and research of Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler, I describe a few of the striking medical effects produced by social networks: By studying Framingham as an interconnected network rather than a mass of individuals,...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 6:32 PM • 13 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
September 23, 2009
Over at GQ, the excellent Paul Tough* profiles Gregg Gillis, the madcap mixer behind Girl Talk. For those of you who aren't cool enough to know - and I'm only cool enough because my younger sister is cool enough -...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 9:29 AM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
September 21, 2009
I finally got around to reading Paul Krugman's takedown of modern economics, which is a lucid dissection of his own field. His core argument is that economists made the old Keatsian error, mistaking a beautiful theory for the truth: As...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 5:39 PM • 8 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
There's a fascinating article in the NY Times Magazine by Sara Corbett on the publication of Jung's infamous Red Book, in which he attempted (often in vain) to map the infinite labyrinth of his unconscious: Some people feel that nobody...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 11:20 AM • 10 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
September 17, 2009
There's one other angle to the social network story that I wasn't able to mention in my Wired essay. Right now, retail companies are investing a pretty penny in consumer preference algorithms, that AI software which suggests books to buy...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 1:59 PM • 11 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
September 15, 2009
Clearly, what the world needs is another blogger weighing in on the Kanye West/Taylor Swift controversy. But I have no interest in castigating Kanye - I don't pick my music based on the politesse of the artists. Instead, what struck...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 5:51 PM • 12 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
September 13, 2009
I've got a new essay on social networks and the research of Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler in the latest issue of Wired: There's something strange about watching life unfold as a social network. It's easy to forget that every...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 6:30 PM • 11 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
September 11, 2009
The human brain, it turns out, is even more efficient than previous estimates: Fifty-seven years ago, Nobel laureates Alan Hodgkin and Andrew Huxley came up with a model to calculate the power behind electrochemical currents in neurons--a great step forward...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 12:33 PM • 14 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Tim Lambert 11.22.2009
PZ Myers 11.22.2009
PZ Myers 11.14.2009
Ed Brayton 11.22.2009
Ed Brayton 11.22.2009
