Now on ScienceBlogs: Oldest Human-Made Object in Space
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.
April 29, 2010
Here's a new interesting new paper on the emotional deficits of the psychopathic brain, via sarcastic_f: The understanding that other people's emotional states depend on the fulfilment of their intention is fundamentally important for responding adequately to others. Psychopathic patients...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 8:42 AM • 33 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 27, 2010
The process of enculturation doesn't just afflict middle-aged scientists, struggling to appreciate a new anomaly. It's a problem for any collection of experts, from CIA analysts to Wall Street bankers. Let's stick with Wall Street, since Goldman Sachs is in...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 6:31 PM • 12 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
I just discovered (via Tyler Cowen) a fascinating economics paper on the changing dynamics of scientific production over the 20th century. A few months ago, I wrote about the tangled relationship of age and innovation, and why different fields have...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 12:45 PM • 12 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 25, 2010
I spent a fair amount of time hanging out with professional poker players while writing How We Decide. For the most part, these players have exquisite control over their facial expressions, so that those micro-muscles around the eyes and mouth...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 8:53 PM • 21 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 23, 2010
Ed Yong has a typically great post on a new Current Biology paper that investigates the link between dreaming and memory consolidation: The last decade of research has clearly shown that sleep is one of the best aide memoires that...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:18 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 22, 2010
Prozac (aka fluoxetine) is one of the most successful drugs of all time. Since its introduction as an antidepressant more than 20 years ago, Prozac has been prescribed to more than 80 million people around the world. Currently, approximately one...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 12:51 PM • 29 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 21, 2010
Experience changes everything. That, at least, is the lesson of a new study of Navy SEALS led by scientists at UCSD. Their experiment was an investigation into the anatomy of emotional perception, or what happens inside the brain when we...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 7:31 PM • 8 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 19, 2010
The lure of instant gratification is hard to resist: when we want something, we want it right now. Of course, maturity and reality demand that we learn to wait, that we postpone our pleasures until tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow....
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 12:31 PM • 24 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 15, 2010
I'm pretty fascinated by this chart from the McKinsey Quarterly, which is a great demonstration of the optimism bias. The chart captures the earnings estimates of equity analysts for S&P 500 companies. The downward slope of these yellow lines is...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 5:30 PM • 13 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
A forthcoming paper by Michael Kraus and Dacher Keltner at UC-Berkeley investigates the correlation between "tactile communication" and success in the NBA. In essence, the paper demonstrates that "touchier" teams - and this includes everything from pats on the ass...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 1:16 PM • 12 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
denialism blog 02.14.2012
respectful insolence 02.14.2012
uncertain principles 02.13.2012
confessions of a science librarian 02.13.2012
starts with a bang! 02.13.2012
