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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.
November 20, 2009
I've got a review of Stanislas Dehaene's new book, Reading in the Brain, over at the Barnes and Noble Review: Right now, your mind is performing an astonishing feat. Photons are bouncing off these black squiggles and lines -- the...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 3:10 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
November 19, 2009
Saks and Barneys and the rest of those luxury retailers have discovered that nothing destroys a luxury brand like a sale: All around Saks Fifth Avenue, merchandise is sold out. The $2,520 Marni shearling vest? Gone. The $5,295 Brioni leather...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 12:59 PM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
November 17, 2009
Bill Belichick has never been the most popular coach in the NFL, but his Sunday night decision to go for it on 4th and 2 on his own 28 with two minutes remaining in the fourth quarter has even his...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 5:09 PM • 9 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Success is intimidating. When we compete against someone who's supposed to be better than us, we start to get nervous, and then we start to worry, and then we start to make stupid mistakes. That, at least, is the lesson...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 12:42 PM • 16 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
November 16, 2009
The WSJ discovers the unreliability of wine critics, citing the fascinating statistical work of Robert Hodgson: In his first study, each year, for four years, Mr. Hodgson served actual panels of California State Fair Wine Competition judges--some 70 judges each...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 9:28 AM • 8 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
November 13, 2009
Ed Yong has a typically excellent post on a new paper that looks at how manipulating dopamine levels in the brain can change our predictions of future pleasure: Tali Sharot from University College London found that if volunteers had more...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 11:20 AM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
November 10, 2009
David Dobbs has a fantastic new article on behavioral genetics at The Atlantic. He adds an important amendment to the vulnerability hypothesis, which holds that certain genes make people more vulnerable to psychiatric disorders. While these snippets of DNA aren't...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 3:28 PM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
November 9, 2009
A new paper by scientists at the Weizmann Institute documents the primal connection between whiffs of smell and episodic memory. This nasal nostalgia is mediated by the hippocampus, the manufacturer of long-term memory in the brain. Here's the abstract: Authors,...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 11:01 AM • 10 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
November 6, 2009
This is absolutely fascinating, yet another reminder that the structure of language infects everything. Here's Nell Greenfieldboyce, at NPR: The distinctive sounds of a newborn's first cries may be influenced by the mother tongue of its parents. A new study...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 1:14 PM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
November 4, 2009
As a chronic insomniac, I'm always a little disturbed when I learn about the lingering cognitive effects of a bad night sleep: In a study at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research in 2003, for example, scientists examined the...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 5:53 PM • 40 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
PZ Myers 11.19.2009
Ed Brayton 11.20.2009
PZ Myers 11.14.2009
Ed Brayton 11.20.2009
Tim Lambert 11.18.2009
