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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.
May 26, 2010
In the last few months, the globalized world has endured two very different crises. First, there was the ash cloud over Europe, which paralyzed air travel for millions of passengers. Then, there is the leaking oil well in the Gulf...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 8:07 PM • 25 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
May 25, 2010
The Allen Brain Atlas just launched their first set of gene expression maps in the adult human brain, based on microarray data from over 700 different anatomical locations. It promises to be an invaluable resource for scientists trying to figure...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 12:48 PM • 10 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
I've got a short feature on the Pixar creative process in the latest issue of Wired. This is one of those magazine spreads that really benefits from a glossy paper layout, so I'd recommend not following this hyperlink, and instead...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 9:36 AM • 30 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
May 24, 2010
Benedict Carey summarizes a new UCLA study that documented the life of middle-class families, videotaping their dinners, conversations and leisure activities: The U.C.L.A. project was an effort to capture a relatively new sociological species: the dual-earner, multiple-child, middle-class American household....
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 9:38 AM • 19 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
May 18, 2010
Mo over at Neurophilosophy has an excellent summary of a new paper on near misses and addictive gambling: Henry Chase and Luke Clark of the Behavioural and Clinical Neuroscience Institute in Cambridge have previously found that the brain responds to...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:01 AM • 13 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
May 17, 2010
Since I've been traveling in a foreign country for the last week - I was sipping sugary tea all over Turkey - I thought this article, published last year in McSweeney's Panorama newspaper, was slightly relevant. If nothing else, it's...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 3:32 PM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
May 13, 2010
Reposted from last year: Michael Posner and Brenda Patoine make a neuroscientific case for arts education. They argue that teaching kids to make art has lasting cognitive benefits: If there were a surefire way to improve your brain, would you...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:59 PM • 24 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
May 12, 2010
Here's a post from last summer*: I went jean shopping this weekend. Actually, I went to the mall to return a t-shirt but ended buying a pair of expensive denim pants. What happened? I made the mistake of entering the...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:42 AM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
May 11, 2010
Here's an old post from July 08: The devious slogan for the New York State lottery is "All you need is a dollar and a dream." Such state lotteries are a regressive form of taxation, since the vast majority of...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:14 AM • 40 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
May 10, 2010
I'm going to be away on vacation for the next week or so. I'll be putting up some old posts in the meantime. Here's one from 2009 on "Boredom": The great poet Joseph Brodsky, praising boredom: A substantial part of...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 9:57 AM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
