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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.
October 30, 2009
I still don't have any additional details, but the initial newspaper report from the Jacksonville Journal-Courier is disturbing: A Southwestern High School English teacher has been suspended after reports he had students in his classes to read an article about...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 11:04 AM • 35 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
October 29, 2009
In the latest N+1, Marco Roth takes a critical look at the rise of the "neuronovel": The last dozen years or so have seen the emergence of a new strain within the Anglo-American novel. What has been variously referred to...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 1:23 PM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
October 27, 2009
Natalie Angiers profiles dopamine, which isn't just about rewards: In the communal imagination, dopamine is about rewards, and feeling good, and wanting to feel good again, and if you don't watch out, you'll be hooked, a slave to the pleasure...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 12:40 PM • 9 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
October 26, 2009
In a recent NY Times Magazine, Mark Bittman (aka the Minimalist) waxes enthusiastic on the potential of online grocery shopping: That's why, to focus on things that could happen in our lifetimes, we should take a look at improving online...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 1:17 PM • 15 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
October 22, 2009
In the latest Mind Matters, the psychologists Henry L. Roediger and Bridgid Finn review some interesting new work by Nate Kornell and colleagues, which looked at the advantages of learning through error. Conventional pedagogy assumes that the best way to...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 3:34 PM • 9 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
David Brooks has written yet another wonderful column on the mind. This time he explores the nagging gap between our intuitions about personality - we each express a particular set of character traits, which can be traced back to our...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 8:49 AM • 23 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
October 20, 2009
Via Felix Salmon comes this amusing anecdote about Robert Parker's blind tasting of 2005 Bordeaux, which he has declared the best vintage since 1982. Parker has previously rated all of these wines, and even given them exact point scores, so...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 9:48 AM • 19 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
October 16, 2009
The New York Times wonders if E-Books are inherently less pleasing for the brain that ink on a page. They canvass a diverse group of experts, most of whom focus on the nature of attention during the reading process. They...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 1:29 PM • 33 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
October 15, 2009
I've got a new article in Nature this week on the growing number of learning and memory enhanced strains of mice, and what these smart rodents can teach us about the human mind. I also discuss Luria's The Mind of...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 12:21 PM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
October 14, 2009
In light of my recent post on the difficulty of changing our decision-making habits - even when we're aware that our habits are biased and flawed - I thought it might be interesting to look at two examples from professional...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 11:28 AM • 17 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Neurophilosophy 11.19.2009
The Island of Doubt 11.20.2009
Greg Laden's Blog 11.20.2009
The World's Fair 11.19.2009
Laelaps 11.20.2009
