Now on ScienceBlogs: The Galaxy's Biggest Valentine
Jonah Lehrer is a contributing editor at Wired. He's also written for The New Yorker, Seed, Nature, and the New York Times and is a contributor to Radiolab. He's the author of Proust Was A Neuroscientist. His new book is How We Decide.
November 30, 2009
There was no sentence in How We Decide that I regretted more than this one, which was first written in the fall of 2007, when Vince Young was the starting quarterback for the Tennessee Titans: Vince Young ended up excelling...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 1:31 PM • 19 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
November 23, 2009
Via Vaughan Bell, comes this wonderful essay by Tom Stafford on confabulation and creativity: In those patients with frontal damage who do confabulate, however, the brain injury makes them rely on their internal memories--their thoughts and wishes--rather than true memories....
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 4:28 PM • 95 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
November 22, 2009
Last week, a team of computer scientists led by Dharmendra S. Modha announced what sounded like an impressive breakthrough for neuroscience-inspired computing: Using Dawn Blue Gene / P supercomputer at Lawrence Livermore National Lab with 147,456 processors and 144 TB...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 3:53 PM • 11 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
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 • 21 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 • 6 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 • 14 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 • 17 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 • 13 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 • 7 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
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