Now on ScienceBlogs: Unitary mindfulness in collective action
Jonah Lehrer is a contributing editor at Wired. He's also written for The New Yorker, Seed, Nature, the Boston Globe and is a contributor to Radio Lab. He's the author of Proust Was A Neuroscientist. His new book is How We Decide.
Category: Neuroscience
An intriguing new hypothesis that seeks to explain all of the diverse psychological symptoms associated with autism. Here's the abstract: While significant advances have been made in identifying the neuronal structures and cells affected, a unifying theory that could explain...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 5:06 AM • 13 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Neuroscience
It's an audacious idea, and I didn't believe it was possible until I saw the video. But it really is possible to teach blind people to see using their tongue. By connecting a camera to an array of electrodes that...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 9:41 AM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Neuroscience
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 by Jonah Lehrer at 11:22 AM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Neuroscience
Christopher Vrountas, of Andover, sent in a very astute letter to the Boston Globe in response to my recent article on dopamine and gambling: I read Jonah Lehrer's article "Your brain on gambling" (Ideas, Aug. 19), about how gambling hijacks...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:23 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Neuroscience
Ten years ago, neuroscientists were bullish about pharmaceuticals. It sometimes seemed as if every tenured professor was starting his own drug company or consulting for someone else's drug company. But virtually none of those drugs have come to market, at...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:28 AM • 8 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Neuroscience
The Best Cigarette, a poem by Billy Collins: Don't forget that cigarette addiction seems to be modulated by the insula, a brain area that secretes aversive emotions. Earlier this year, a team of scientists at the University of Iowa found...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 9:57 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Neuroscience
Our mind has a sick sense of humor. It turns out that as we lose our memory, and sink into the darkness of dementia, the last memories to disappear are the memories we spent our lives trying to repress. So...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 9:34 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Neuroscience
Here's a very cool experiment: Using virtual reality goggles, a camera and a stick, scientists have induced out-of-body experiences -- the sensation of drifting outside of one's own body -- in healthy people, according to experiments being published in the...
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 4:51 PM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Neuroscience
How the Battle of Gettysburg led to the discovery of phantom limbs.
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 9:49 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Neuroscience
A great series on Gary Lynch.
Posted by Jonah Lehrer at 10:25 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
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Corpus Callosum 11.05.2009
Starts With a Bang 11.04.2009
