Me at Google
I visited the Cambridge Google offices last month and talked about Escoffier, umami, Kanye West and the plasticity of dopamine neurons:...Posted on July 18, 2008 10:32 AM • 6 Comments •
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Profile
Jonah Lehrer is an editor at large for Seed Magazine. His first book is Proust Was A Neuroscientist. Buy it here.
Recent Posts
- Physics and McSweeney's
- Choosing is Hard
- The Number Four
- Deliberate Practice
- The Neuroscience of Insight
- Memory and Addiction
- Rational Voters?
- Me at Google
- Data Visualization
- Buying the Wrong House
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Blogs I've Recently Enjoyed
Humanities & Social Science:
Data Visualization
Speaking of data visualization, a reader sent along this link to some fabulous examples. Each of these images, according to artist and creator Jason Salavon, is composed of "100 unique commemorative photographs culled from the internet. The final compositions are...Posted on July 17, 2008 11:59 AM • 2 Comments •
Radiohead and Consilience
This is a fourth culture I can believe in: Google has a lot more on how the video was made using 64 rotating lasers (no cameras!) and some cool data visualization programs. (They also released the raw data for the...Posted on July 16, 2008 9:59 AM • 3 Comments •
Pretty Pictures
What you need is a distraction from the drip of bad economic news. (Just remember: the stock market is a random walk that, over the long-term, has an upward slope. Besides, investors who do nothing to their stock portfolio -...Posted on July 15, 2008 1:48 PM • 3 Comments •
Music and Words
Hit songs are getting wordier: Average word count of top-ten songs during the 1960s: 176 Average last year: 436 That's from the latest Harper's Index, via Marginal Revolution. I think this trend is pretty clearly a result of hip-hop and...Posted on July 15, 2008 9:59 AM • 5 Comments •
Bling
Why do poor people spend so much money on brand-name items and flashy status symbols? The answer is power. Those Calvin Klein boxers are a desperate attempt at compensation. Here's Kevin Lewis of the Globe Ideas section: If people low...Posted on July 14, 2008 11:49 AM • 2 Comments •
Practical Inventions
An Onion classic: Is there no morality in science? Last night I tried to have a barbecue on my back patio and I ran inside before the spicy shish-kabobs were even half-grilled because of the mosquitoes. With all that chemical...Posted on July 1, 2008 1:48 PM • 8 Comments •
Whitman and Waterfalls
Somewhere, Walt Whitman is smiling: From "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry": FLOOD-TIDE below me! I watch you face to face; Clouds of the west! sun there half an hour high! I see you also face to face. Crowds of men and women...Posted on June 27, 2008 2:55 PM • 0 Comments •
Storytelling and Science
Robert Krulwich, speaking at the Caltech Commencement, issues a cri de coeur for the importance of stories, even (especially!) when speaking about science: Because talking about science, telling science stories to regular folks like me and your parents, is not...Posted on June 23, 2008 11:40 AM • 4 Comments •
Manil Suri
I really enjoyed The Death of Vishnu when it came out several years ago. It was a Calvinoesque exploration of a single Bombay apartment dwelling, as refracted through the prism of a dying peasant. But I had no idea that...Posted on June 17, 2008 9:52 AM • 1 Comments •
Bumper Stickers Are Dangerous
When I first got a Prius, I was tempted to cover the rear bumper with liberal decals, like "Support Local Farms!" (that's on my bike) or "Women for Obama!" (a popular Prius sticker here in New Hampshire). I wanted to...Posted on June 16, 2008 1:29 PM • 9 Comments •
Time Travel
Over at Marginal Revolution, a commenter asks Tyler a great question: I wanted to ask for survival tips in case I am unexpectedly transported to a random location in Europe (say for instance current France/Benelux/Germany) in the year 1000 AD...Posted on June 12, 2008 10:11 AM • 3 Comments •
Bill Wood
I wandered into the ICP a few weeks ago, wandering amid Midtown with an hour to spare. I ended up transfixed by an exhibit called Bill Wood's Business: The Bill Wood Photo Company supplied local snap shooters and amateur photographers...Posted on June 11, 2008 11:53 AM • 5 Comments •
Religious Ritual
Allegra Goodman is a marvelous writer. Intuition, her last novel, was an uncannily accurate depiction of the slog of a science lab. It captured the epic tedium of empiricism, the way experiments are ambiguous even when they work. (And they...Posted on June 5, 2008 12:45 PM • 2 Comments •
Remote Tribes
Sometimes, when I walk through international airports, I get a little sad about the homogeneity of homo sapiens. I guess it's an inevitable by-product of globalization and modernity, but I can't help but wish that we didn't all drink Starbucks...Posted on June 4, 2008 5:43 PM • 5 Comments •
Mozart and Medicine
There are lots of ways to combine science and art. Some of them are more problematic than others: One of the strangest exhibits at the opening of "Design and the Elastic Mind," the very strange show at the Museum of...Posted on May 21, 2008 11:17 AM • 1 Comments •
Plane Reading
Sorry about the light posting - I've been traveling. As far as I'm concerned, the best thing about air-travel (besides the safety aspect) is that I get to read novels. For some reason, I've decided that I can't work or...Posted on May 9, 2008 12:02 PM • 4 Comments •
DNA Evidence
In recent years, there has been lots of speculation on the potential intersection of neuroscience and the legal system. Will brain imaging became a fool-proof lie detector? Are some violent offenders suffering from a defective emotional brain that's beyond their...Posted on May 6, 2008 9:56 AM • 6 Comments •
Literature, Psychology and the Elites
Razib has some thought-provoking, if incorrect, speculations on literature, literary audiences and modernity: Here's the argument: contemporary mainstream fiction is very different from the storytelling of the deep past because of a demand side shift. Women consume most fiction today,...Posted on May 2, 2008 10:59 AM • 22 Comments •
Olafur Eliasson
Go see his new show at MoMA. Here's Peter Schjeldahl: Eliasson is entertaining, yet his central concern seems less a working of spectacular magic than an investigation of how spectacular magic works. He raises awareness of the neurological susceptibilities that...Posted on April 24, 2008 11:58 AM • 0 Comments •
Mariah Carey
When I mutter about the fourth culture, about the possibility of bridging the cultural chasms separating art and science, I should make it clear that I'm not talking about stuff like this. In fact, I think there's something mildly offensive...Posted on April 14, 2008 9:46 AM • 9 Comments •
Art and Science
Here's Junot Diaz, talking about his writing process: It was an incredibly difficult struggle. I tell a lot of young people I work with that nothing should be more inspirational than my dumb ass. It took me 11 years to...Posted on April 7, 2008 11:59 AM • 12 Comments •
Eating Octopus
It seems that you can't go to a chic restaurant nowadays without encountering octopus on the menu. Like its cephalopod cousins, octotpus is best cooked according to the "two-minute or two-hour" rule. You can either grill the octopus quickly, imbuing...Posted on April 6, 2008 11:52 AM • 12 Comments •
A History of Objectivity
I've been remiss in not linking to Benjamin Cohen's incredibly interesting series of posts on scientific objectivity. The mere fact that objectivity *has* a history is revealing. It's more typical that the timeless, ahuman connotation of "objectivity" renders it the...Posted on April 2, 2008 10:46 AM • 3 Comments •
Religion and Tribal Cooperation
A commenter asked an astute question in response to my post on religion and dietary laws: What are your thoughts on kashrut primarily as a means of group indentity reinforcement, ritual, and control? In pre-literate times or in unstable social...Posted on March 27, 2008 4:19 AM • 2 Comments •
Basketball Brackets and Inherent Unpredictability
My bracket is a disaster: I seem to have an uncanny talent for picking all the wrong upsets. But perhaps I should find solace in the fact that the NCAA tournament is inherently unpredictable. That, at least, was the conclusion...Posted on March 24, 2008 10:29 AM • 0 Comments •
Anonymous Critics and Science Journalism
Over at Mixing Memory, there's an excellent and fierce critique of a recent fMRI paper on linguistic relativity. Although the post is shot through with overly broad insults - he or she complains about "how much cognitive neuroscience sucks" -...Posted on March 21, 2008 12:37 PM • 8 Comments •
Flight and Wonder
Flying back from Little Rock, I had the pleasure of sitting next to a 68 year old man who had never flown on a plane before. For most of us, traveling through the air at 400 mph on a steel...Posted on March 19, 2008 12:06 PM • 2 Comments •
Meat
Words of wisdom from Dario Checcini, the famous Tuscan butcher: "The most important thing is what the animal eats and that it has a good life . . . just like us," Cecchini says. "My philosophy is that the cow...Posted on March 12, 2008 11:59 AM • 4 Comments •
The Fourth Culture
In my recent Seed article on science and art, I wrote about how we need to foster a new cultural movement: If we are serious about unifying human knowledge, then we'll need to create a new movement that coexists with...Posted on February 22, 2008 10:21 AM • 0 Comments •
InnoCentive
Have you heard about InnoCentive? It's my new favorite website. The premise of the site is simple: "seekers" post their scientific problems and "solvers" try to solve them. If the problem is successfully solved, then the "solver" gets a specified...Posted on February 20, 2008 10:32 AM • 8 Comments •
Diversity and Problem-Solving
There are so many reasons to despair about human diversity. There's Iraq, Kenya, the immigration debate, the research of Robert Putnam. It seems that, in tragic example after tragic example, humans react to diversity by splintering into tribalisms, regressing to...Posted on February 15, 2008 9:58 AM • 6 Comments •
Art or Wal-Mart?
Here's a good test of your critical acumen. This site has a quiz comparing the priceless designs of Donald Judd against cheap furniture from Ikea and Wal-Mart. It's often surprisingly hard to tell the two apart, although I take this...Posted on February 7, 2008 11:21 AM • 15 Comments •
Words To Live By
This is from Paul Bloom's review of Kwame Anthony Appiah's new book on the uses and abuses of experimental philosophy: Near the end of the book, Appiah says that when he tells a stranger on a plane that he is...Posted on February 2, 2008 10:47 AM • 2 Comments •
Olafur Eliasson
One of the questions I get asked most often when discussing my book is what artists working today are creating work that's relevant to the discourse of science. My stock answer is to mutter something inarticulate about Richard Powers. But...Posted on January 31, 2008 10:46 AM • 4 Comments •
Popularizing Science
Are too many neuroscientists are trying to popularize the state of their science? Jason Zevin thinks so: At best, most of what is known is more complicated than I'm able to understand--much less explain to a general audience. And at...Posted on January 24, 2008 9:58 PM • 9 Comments •
Football and Violence
Economists parse the stats and find the correlation: We find that college football games are associated with sharp increases in crime. For instance, assaults increase by about 9% when a community hosts a college football game, vandalism increases by about...Posted on January 17, 2008 1:10 PM • 6 Comments •
The Future of Science is Art
My recent article in Seed is now online. Here is the nut graf: The current constraints of science make it clear that the breach between our two cultures is not merely an academic problem that stifles conversation at cocktail parties....Posted on January 16, 2008 12:07 PM • 8 Comments •
Newsweek
There's an interview with me in Newsweek.com: NEWSWEEK: What surprised you most while doing the research for this book? Jonah Lehrer: One thing was how seriously all of these artists took their art. They really believed that their novels and...Posted on January 10, 2008 10:40 AM • 7 Comments •
The Benefits of Diversity
The Times has an interesting interview with Scott Page, a professor of complex systems, political science and economics at the University of Michigan: Q. In your book you posit that organizations made up of different types of people are more...Posted on January 8, 2008 10:21 AM • 5 Comments •
Habermas on Rorty
A lovely appreciation: I received the news in an email almost exactly a year ago. As so often in recent years, Rorty voiced his resignation at the "war president" Bush, whose policies deeply aggrieved him, the patriot who had always...Posted on January 7, 2008 10:35 AM • 4 Comments •
Old Arguments
Daniel Davies has compiled a smart list of arguments that he is no longer going to have. He explains: While not necessarily claiming to have the definitive truth on these subjects, my views are no longer up for argument, pending...Posted on January 4, 2008 2:59 PM • 9 Comments •
The War on Drugs
Ben Wallace-Wells, in Rolling Stone, recently wrote a fantastic and tragic article on America's War on Drugs: All told, the United States has spent an estimated $500 billion to fight drugs - with very little to show for it. Cocaine...Posted on December 19, 2007 9:55 AM • 17 Comments •
Fractals and Literature
Jason Kottke, a consistent fount of great links, finds a revealing interview with David Foster Wallace about Infinite Jest. Here is DFW answering a question about whether or not his novel actually follows a fractal form*: David Foster Wallace: That's...Posted on December 11, 2007 9:49 AM • 3 Comments •
Experimental Philosophy
No, it's not an oxymoron: philosophers have discovered the virtue of experimentation. Now a restive contingent of our tribe is convinced that it can shed light on traditional philosophical problems by going out and gathering information about what people actually...Posted on December 10, 2007 9:17 AM • 20 Comments •
The Future of Science is Art?
So the new Seed is now on the newstands. I've got a longish essay sketching out possible future interactions between science and art: The current constraints of science make it clear that the breach between our two cultures is not...Posted on December 6, 2007 3:59 PM • 4 Comments •
Darwin and Cheese
From the great Harold McGee comes an investigation into raw milk, bacteria and cultural evolution: On our journey up to the Stichelton Dairy last September, Mr. Hodgson [a cheesemaker] explained how cheese quality progressed for centuries, then declined in the...Posted on December 5, 2007 9:59 AM • 7 Comments •
Driving in Snow and Risk Homeostasis
I had the pleasure of driving for a few hours in yesterday's New England blizzard. (I was coming back from a radio interview for "On Point," which is broadcast out of WBUR in Boston. You can listen to me here.)...Posted on December 4, 2007 10:05 AM • 15 Comments •
McEwan, Nabokov and Fake Science
Ian McEwan is mischievous. He ends Enduring Love - a novel about a science writer - with a carefully faked psychiatric study from a non-existent British medical journal. Although the syndrome discussed in the article is real - De Clerambault's...Posted on November 29, 2007 10:13 AM • 2 Comments •
Slate
I'm quickly learning that these webmagazines really don't like my book. This review, however, is actually rather thoughtful. Daniel Engber of Slate begins by pointing out that neuroscientists are constantly quoting Proust: My career as a grad student in neuroscience...Posted on November 26, 2007 3:43 PM • 4 Comments •
The Faith of Scientists
Paul Davies dares to utter the f-word in the context of science: The problem with this neat separation into "non-overlapping magisteria," as Stephen Jay Gould described science and religion, is that science has its own faith-based belief system. All science...Posted on November 24, 2007 12:59 PM • 18 Comments •
Taking Art Seriously
Earlier this week, the National Endowment for the Arts came out with a disturbing report: Americans -- particularly young Americans -- appear to be reading less for fun, and as that happens, their reading test scores are declining. At the...Posted on November 21, 2007 10:12 AM • 11 Comments •
Two Cultures
Ouch. I got my first nasty review today. (For some nice reviews, check out the NY Times, LA Times, NY Post, Amazon, etc.) In Salon, Jonathan Keats takes issue with the basic premise of the book, which is that meaningful...Posted on November 20, 2007 11:37 AM • 9 Comments •
Science Critics
In response to my call for science critics, a position analogous to a music critic or art critic except that they review the latest science papers, a commenter wrote the following: "Why don't we have science critics?" We do. It's...Posted on November 16, 2007 9:28 AM • 6 Comments •
Molecular Gastronomy
The new epicurean trend has arrived: hydrocolloids: Despite its imposing name, a hydrocolloid is a simple thing. A colloid is a suspension of particles within some substance. A hydrocolloid is a suspension of particles in water where the particles are...Posted on November 6, 2007 11:25 PM • 6 Comments •
Auden
Here's W.H. Auden in The Dyer's Hand generalizing about our senses: "The ear tends to be lazy, craves the familiar and is shocked by the unexpected; the eye, on the other hand, tends to be impatient, craves the novel and...Posted on November 5, 2007 6:55 AM • 1 Comments •
Writing Sentences
Taking advantage of a new Amazon feature, Steven Johnson does some literary data-mining: The two stats that I found totally fascinating were "Average Words Per Sentence" and "% Complex Words," the latter defined as words with three or more syllables...Posted on October 22, 2007 4:48 PM • 2 Comments •
Exporting Depression
America is getting good at exporting our diseases. Everybody already talks about obesity and the way American eating habits are slowly fattening up the rest of the world. But that's not the only disease we are sending abroad. Here's VSL*:...Posted on October 19, 2007 11:29 AM • 1 Comments •
The Psychology of Los Angeles
Bldg blog writes an ode to LA: L.A. is the apocalypse: it's you and a bunch of parking lots. No one's going to save you; no one's looking out for you. It's the only city I know where that's the...Posted on October 18, 2007 11:43 AM • 4 Comments •
Proust Was A Neuroscientist
So my book, Proust Was A Neuroscientist, is now shipping from Amazon and Barnes and Noble. It might even be in your local bookstore. I'll do my best not to turn this blog into an orgy of self-promotion, but feel...Posted on October 16, 2007 10:16 AM • 10 Comments •
Sparrows and Schoenberg
Alex Ross brings my attention to a recent letter in Science: "...Watanabe and Sato [Behav. Processes 47, 1 (1999)] have shown that Java sparrows can discriminate between Bach's French Suite no. 5 in G minor and Arnold Schoenberg's Suite for...Posted on October 11, 2007 9:56 AM • 3 Comments •
Chimps Are More Rational
Or at least they play the ultimatum game more rationally than humans: German researchers have demonstrated chimpanzees make choices that protect their self-interest more consistently than do humans. Researchers from the Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig studied...Posted on October 10, 2007 9:59 AM • 3 Comments •
Anthropology and the Military
This seems like a really good thing: In this isolated Taliban stronghold in eastern Afghanistan, American paratroopers are fielding what they consider a crucial new weapon in counterinsurgency operations here: a soft-spoken civilian anthropologist named Tracy. Tracy, who asked that...Posted on October 5, 2007 9:49 AM • 2 Comments •
Homosexuality, Iran and Identity
In light of Mahmoud Ahmadenijad's recent comment about there being no gay people in Iran, Matthew Yglesias links to this really interesting article about homosexuals in Saudi Arabia: What seems more startling, at least from a Western perspective, is that...Posted on September 28, 2007 12:19 PM • 7 Comments •
Are Men Happier than Women?
From David Leonhardt: There appears to be a growing happiness gap between men and women. Two new research papers, using very different methods, have both come to this conclusion. Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers, economists at the University of Pennsylvania...Posted on September 26, 2007 8:38 AM • 8 Comments •
Chat Rooms
Context is everything: Sana Klaric and husband Adnan, who used the names "Sweetie" and "Prince of Joy" in an online chatroom, spent hours telling each other about their marriage troubles, Metro.co.uk reported. The truth emerged when the two turned up...Posted on September 21, 2007 12:18 PM • 4 Comments •
Market Bubbles and Human Nature
Alan Greenspan seems to have discovered the irrationality of human nature. In his recent appearance on the Daily Show, he lamented the stubborn persistence of financial bubbles, from junk bonds to dot-com stocks to real estate. (For a thorough history...Posted on September 21, 2007 10:08 AM • 2 Comments •
Religion Without God (Judaism Version)
So it's the High Holy Day season again - the pious two weeks in the Jewish calendar connecting Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur - and that means that many American Jews are going to shul. For most of these religious...Posted on September 20, 2007 9:57 AM • 23 Comments •
Why Do We Need the Humanities?
Do the arts serve a purpose in a scientific world?Posted on September 18, 2007 11:17 AM • 8 Comments •
Flight and Disorientation
My vestibular system is totally confused: See James Fallows for the explanation. Movies like this make me glad that pilots rely on gyroscopes to guide them through the clouds....Posted on September 12, 2007 1:23 PM • 0 Comments •
Measuring Love with CEO Pay
From Tyler Cowen: 1. In Danish data, if a CEO's child dies, the value of that CEO's company falls by one-fifth in the following two years. 2. If a CEO's wife dies, the value of that CEO's company falls by...Posted on September 6, 2007 11:05 AM • 1 Comments •
Psychotherapy and Feminism
I'm a big fan of Mad Men, the new HBOesque drama about 1960's advertising executives on AMC. It's basically an extended melodrama about why the Ike years actually sucked, and neatly punctures that lame American nostalgia for the "simpler" times...Posted on September 4, 2007 7:10 PM • 3 Comments •
Solving the Subprime Mess
A few weeks ago, I put up a post on the neuroscience of subprime mortgages. A significant percentage of subprime loans get customers by advertising low introductory teaser rates, which trick the brain into making an irrational decision. In essence,...Posted on August 31, 2007 11:22 AM • 5 Comments •
