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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.
June 29, 2010
Ever since Pac Man, video games have obeyed a few basic principles: A player sits down in front of a screen and presses a few buttons with his or her thumbs. Perhaps there's a joystick involved, or maybe the index...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 12:55 PM • 31 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 28, 2010
The intelligence test is badly named. The main problem is that we should be talking about intelligence tests in plural, so that the IQ test is merely one of the many measures we use to assess our innate mental skills....
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 12:44 PM • 28 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 24, 2010
I was a stuttering child. Whenever I got the slightest bit nervous, I had an annoying tendency to run out of air on vowel sounds, so that beginning a phrase with "A" or "eee" or "I" was all but impossible....
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 12:59 PM • 56 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 22, 2010
I have a complicated relationship with my GPS unit. On the one hand, it rarely works. Here's what happened the last time I turned it on. First, there was a five minute delay while it searched for the satellite signal....
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 1:37 PM • 14 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 21, 2010
Clive Thompson has a wonderful article in the NY Times Magazine on Watson, the supercomputer programmed to excel at Jeopardy. Thompson delves into the clever heuristics used to generate singular answers to ambiguous questions. (Watson relies on massive amounts of...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 12:26 PM • 14 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 18, 2010
Over at the Barnes and Noble Review, I have a short review of Cognitive Surplus, the new book by Clay Shirky: Cognitive Surplus, the new book by internet guru Clay Shirky, begins with a brilliant analogy. He starts with a...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 5:41 PM • 18 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 15, 2010
Sam Tanenhaus has an interesting essay on the relationship between age and literary genius, which was prompted by the new New Yorker fiction issue, featuring a list of 20 accomplished writers under the age of 40. Tanenhaus argues that the...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 12:21 PM • 19 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 14, 2010
The Yale psychologist Paul Bloom has written an excellent new book, How Pleasure Works, that I had the pleasure of blurbing. The book elegantly refutes the idea that our pleasures are mere sensations, or that our delight can be neatly...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 11:43 AM • 24 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 10, 2010
I'd like to tell you a story about a routine of modern life that is really bad for your brain. Everybody performs this activity - sometimes multiple times a day! - and yet we rarely realize the consequences. In 2008,...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 7:30 AM • 47 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 9, 2010
I recently had a short article in Wired on the danger of getting too enthralled with our empirical tools, which leads us to neglect everything that our tools can't explain: A typical experiment in functional magnetic resonance imaging goes like...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 1:44 AM • 15 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
