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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.
February 28, 2010
I'm a terrible sleeper, which is perhaps why I got invited to contribute to a NY Times group blog on "insomnia, sleep and the nocturnal life". Here is my first contribution, which focuses on the work of Dan Wegner: My...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 9:32 PM • 41 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
February 26, 2010
I've got an article on the upside of depression in the latest New York Times Magazine. If you'd like to learn more about this controversial theory, I'd suggest reading the original paper, "The Bright Side of Being Blue: Depression as...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 1:08 PM • 61 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
February 25, 2010
Sarcasm is a cognitive challenge. In order to get the sarcastic sentiment, we can't simply decode the utterance, or decipher the literal meaning of the sentence. Instead, we have to understand the meaning of the words in their larger social...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 12:01 PM • 19 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
February 22, 2010
In my recent WSJ article on age and creativity, I didn't have space to discuss the fascinating research of David Galenson, an economist at the University of Chicago who brings together a vast array of evidence to better understand the...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 6:46 PM • 24 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
A few weeks ago, I got an email wondering why people sometimes "break into uncontrollable laughter or smiling when faced with terrible situations, like death or illness." Where does this perverse emotional reaction come from? Why do we smile at...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 12:51 PM • 41 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
February 19, 2010
I've got a new article in the Wall Street Journal on the complex relationship between age and scientific creativity: When James Watson was 24 years old, he spent more time thinking about women than work, according to his memoir "Genes,...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 7:57 PM • 17 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
February 18, 2010
I've been reading a number of papers on the "science" of consciousness - I'll let the quotes express my skepticism - and I thought this clever metaphor from Francis Crick and Christof Koch, in their influential 2003 Nature review, was...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 11:32 AM • 27 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
February 15, 2010
Mark Bittman wonders if soda is the new tobacco, and explores the possibility of a tax on sugary, carbonated beverages: A tax on soda was one option considered to help pay for health care reform (the Joint Committee on Taxation...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 11:59 AM • 27 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
In the latest New York Review of Books, Charles Petersen has an interesting and even-handed analysis of Facebook and social networking: What many find most enticing about Facebook is the steady stream of updates from "friends," new and old, which...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 11:08 AM • 73 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
February 11, 2010
One of the lingering questions in decision science is the extent to which game theory - an abstract theory about how people can maximize their outcomes in simple interactions - is actually valid. It's a lovely idea, but does it...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:34 AM • 30 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
