Jonah Lehrer
Jonah Lehrer is an editor at large for Seed Magazine. His first book, Proust Was A Neuroscientist, will be published by Houghton-Mifflin in 2007.
cortex
Posts by this author
January 28, 2009
Over at Mind Hacks, Vaughan has a typically wonderful post on the "maternal impression" theory, which suggested that a psychological trauma inflicted on the pregnant mother would lead to profound defects in the unborn child. As Vaughan notes, this crude 19th century theory slowly faded away, as it…
January 27, 2009
John Updike died today. He was one of my favorite writers, although I didn't fall in love with his work until I lived for a few years outside of America. It was then that I first read the complete Rabbit series, from "Rabbit, Run" to "Rabbit Remembered" and became rather obsessed with his short…
January 26, 2009
The NY Times reports on a fascinating new study showing that Obama's election has improved the test scores of African Americans, at least in this one very small study which has yet to undergo peer-review:
Now researchers have documented what they call an Obama effect, showing that a performance gap…
January 24, 2009
I've got a short column in the Wall Street Journal today where I recommend five books on human irrationality. I wanted to work in a novel too, but I soon realized that every novel is about irrational people.
1. Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds
By Charles Mackay
1841
There…
January 23, 2009
So far, my favorite response to the annual Brockman challenge - this year, the question was "What will change everything?" - comes from the physicist Stuart Kauffman:
Reductionism has reigned as our dominant world view for 350 years in Western society. Physicist Steven Weinberg states that when the…
January 22, 2009
So the book is now shipping from Amazon, B&N, Powells, Borders, independent booksellers, etc. I thought I'd post an interview I conducted with myself a few months ago. (Once upon a time, I read these author Q&A's that are used for publicity purposes and thought that someone else was asking…
January 22, 2009
I know, I know, you're probably sick of me prattling on about metacognition. If so, then feel free to skip this post. I've got a new article in the latest Seed (it's a particularly good issue, I think, although it's not yet online) on the virtues and vices of thinking about thinking:
The game only…
January 21, 2009
Science exists in a cultural context. When the culture changes - and American culture has just a celebrated a rather massive change - the science is sure to follow. It's a truism but it's still true: our experiments don't take place in a vacuum. Scientists are members of society, too.
Sometimes,…
January 19, 2009
The brain is a careless beast. Mostly, I blame my carelessness on the limited capacity of working memory - it can hold seven discrete items, plus or minus two - which means that we're constantly forcing ideas to exit the stage of awareness. And so thoughts come and go, as we try to juggle the…
January 17, 2009
So I joined Twitter. I'm still not on Facebook, for intransigent reasons that I don't fully understand and can't begin to express. But consider Twitter my bold leap into the world of the social web. I guess what I enjoy about Twitter is the sheer banality of the tweets, which remind me of normal,…
January 17, 2009
I've got an op-ed today in the LA Times on how Captain Sullenberger managed to stay calm in the face of terrifying circumstances:
We can all learn something from Capt. Chesley B. "Sully" Sullenberger III. After his US Airways plane lost power and the smell of smoke and jet fuel filled the cabin, he…
January 15, 2009
One of my recurring weaknesses as a writer is a reliance on the following two transitions:
"Consider the X"
and
Look, for instance, at the X
I use them all the time, even though I know they are lazy linguistic bridges, cheap transitions from idea to the next. Over at Language Log, Benjamin Zimmer…
January 15, 2009
Here's James Surowiecki on the surprising link between easy credit and rampant fraud, as epitomized by the Madoff ponzi scheme:
Fraud is a boom-time crime because it feeds on the faith of investors, and during bubbles that faith is overflowing. So while robbing a bank seems to be a demand-driven…
January 14, 2009
Here's the philosopher David Chalmers, arguing that it's time we expand our definition of the "mind":
"The key idea is that when bits of the environment are hooked up to your cognitive system in the right way, they are, in effect, part of the mind, part of the cognitive system. So, say I'm…
January 13, 2009
Steven Pinker has a very lucid and engaging summary of personal genomics in the latest Times Magazine. Pinker got his exons sequenced and is optimistic that large-scale genetic testing will soon reveal the snippets of DNA underlying our preferences, predilections and peccadillos:
Dopamine is the…
January 12, 2009
In yesterday's Washington Post, I reviewed The Art Instinct, a new book by Denis Dutton that uses evolutionary psychology to explain the odd human obsession with making art:
The list of cultural universals -- those features that recur in every human society, from remote rainforest tribes to modern…
January 9, 2009
Uwe Reinhardt, an economist at Princeton, has a thoughtful explanation of why macroeconomists were so blindsided by the economic downtown of 2008:
Fewer than a dozen prominent economists saw this economic train wreck coming -- and the Federal Reserve chairman, Ben Bernanke, an economist famous for…
January 9, 2009
In November 2007, I had a longish article in Best Life Magazine on the psychology of chronic back pain. Apparently, the version of the article on the Best Life website no longer works, and I regularly get emails from people asking to read the actual text. So in order to establish a future reference…
January 8, 2009
You'd never know it from my recent article on the urban brain (and the cognitive benefits of nature) but I love walking in cities. In fact, a leisurely stroll in a metropolis is one of my favorite things to do. Sure, it might tire my prefrontal cortex a bit - there's just so much to see - but it's…
January 8, 2009
In the latest Seed, Steven Shapin has a great essay on the state of modern science. We take the current setup, in which science is a professional activity, shaped by peer-review journals and the priorities of funding institutions, for granted. But it was not always so. Once upon a time, scientists…
January 7, 2009
A quick programming note: I'll be speaking at the Corcoran Gallery of Art next Monday, January 12. The lecture begins at 7 and, unfortunately, costs money. (I always get very insecure at the prospect of having people pay to hear me speak.) I'm currently in the process of developing my stump speech…
January 6, 2009
Just a quick note to welcome back David Dobbs to the blogosphere. He's a fine, fine journalist and I'm thrilled that he's realized that long-form reportage can co-exist with blogging. I look forward to reading his future posts over at Neuron Culture.
Also, a quick endorsement that's long overdue:…
January 6, 2009
Here's an interesting finding, which is summarized by Kevin Lewis in the Boston Globe Ideas section:
If you've ever had to take a test in a room with a lot of people, you may be able to relate to this study: The more people you're competing against, it turns out, the less motivated and competitive…
January 5, 2009
I just wanted to draw attention to two fantastic blog posts that describe a new paper by Edward Vul, a grad student at MIT, and colleagues at UCSD. The first post comes from Vaughan over at MindHacks:
I've just come across a bombshell of a paper that looked at numerous headline studies on the…
January 5, 2009
I had a longish article in the Boston Globe Ideas section yesterday exploring some recent research on how living in a city affects the brain:
The city has always been an engine of intellectual life, from the 18th-century coffeehouses of London, where citizens gathered to discuss chemistry and…
January 2, 2009
Baby strollers have become the latest bougie status symbol, but it's worth noting that one of the most important stroller features is almost always ignored. Here's VSL:
According to a new study, babies who sat in strollers that faced their parents during their daily walks had twice as many…
December 30, 2008
I'll have more to say about cities and the brain in the coming days, but I thought it was worth highlighting this thoughtful post by the economist Edward Glaeser on how NYC is "America's most resilient city":
When other cities, including Boston, experienced significant population declines from 1950…
December 30, 2008
I've written before about the the failure of basic neuroscience research to advance neuropharmacology (at least, it's been a failure so far), but it's nice to see Eric Kandel, my old mentor (and one of my scientific heroes), make the same argument. Kandel began his scientific career as a Freudian…
December 24, 2008
Oliver Morton has a lyrical and thoughtful op-ed today in the Times, in which he re-interprets the famous images of Planet earth seen from space:
They came for the Moon, and for the first three orbits it was to the Moon that the astronauts of Apollo 8 devoted their attention. Only on their fourth…
December 22, 2008
Tonight is the first night of Hanukkah, which is, as Adam Sandler has correctly noted, a rather unsatisfying holiday. It's typically sold to impressionable Jewish kids as being better than Christmas, since there are eight days of presents, and not just one climactic morning. But as one soon…