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
November 13, 2008
Zadie Smith has a terrific essay in the NY Review of Books on the future of the novel, or why realism - even when perfectly executed - has limitations:
From two recent novels, a story emerges about the future for the Anglophone novel. Both are the result of long journeys. Netherland, by Joseph O'…
November 12, 2008
I've been really enjoying Alex and Me, the new book by Irene Pepperberg, and not only because I've got an African Grey of my own. It's full of wonderful anecdotes like this:
The students occasionally took Alex to the washroom, where there was a very large mirror above the sinks. Alex used to march…
November 12, 2008
It's hard to imagine that fifteen years ago scientists were forced to read old science papers on actual paper, as they paged through bound volumes of past journals. How quaint! How inefficient! (All that wasted shelf space...) How scholarly, in an old-school kind of way! It's so much easier to just…
November 11, 2008
Think, for a moment, about one of your cherished childhood memories, one of those sepia-tinged recollections that you've repeated countless times. I've got some bad news: big chunks of that memory are almost certainly not true. According to scientists, the brain is a consummate liar, a bullshit…
November 10, 2008
Thoreau would have liked this study: interacting with nature (at least when compared to a hectic urban landscape) dramatically improves improve cognitive function. In particular, being in natural settings restores our ability to exercise directed attention and working memory, which are crucial…
November 6, 2008
From the fanastic series of just-released Newsweek articles on the presidential campaign:
Obama was something unusual in a politician: genuinely self-aware. In late May 2007, he had stumbled through a couple of early debates and was feeling uncertain about what he called his "uneven" performance. "…
November 6, 2008
Whatever It Takes, the new book by Paul Tough that profiles Geoffrey Canada and the Harlem Children's Zone, is one of the most bracing, sobering and inspiring books I've read in a while. It's the story of one man's attempt to systematically disrupt the cycle of poverty, and fundamentally alter the…
November 5, 2008
The Boston Globe Ideas section recently published a short interview I did with Kelly Bulkeley, author of the quite interesting "Dreaming in the World's Religions". It's an attempt to extract some common psychological themes from the descriptions of dreaming and dream-states in various religious…
November 5, 2008
Rolling Stone recently published a truly excellent article by David Lipsky on the struggles, triumphs and suicide of David Foster Wallace. It's a heart-breaking read, a chronicle of a genius done in by a mental illness. (It reminded me, in parts, of Woolf's diaries: the acute self-consciousness,…
November 5, 2008
Indulge me, for I can't stop thinking about this poem. It's an excerpt from The Cure at Troy, by Seamus Heaney:
Human beings suffer,
they torture one another,
they get hurt and get hard.
No poem or play or song
can fully right a wrong
inflicted or endured.
The innocent in gaols
beat on their bars…
November 1, 2008
This sounds like a fantastic event, a genuine dialogue between artists and scientists:
The taste of a ripe tomato, the hook of a catchy song, the scent of a lover's hair. What is it, exactly, that drives us to seek these things again and again?
Neuroscientists who study perception are starting to…
October 30, 2008
Over at Mind Hacks, Vaughan discusses a fascinating new paper on how psychotic delusions take on different manifestations over time:
A Slovenian research team, led by psychiatrist Borut Skodlar, discovered that the Ljubljana psychiatric hospital had patient records going as far back as 1881. They…
October 28, 2008
You know what I think about when I hear about the epic failure of all these fancy financial models that were designed to calculate risk? I think about the Atlantic Cod. These fish used to be everywhere. (Once upon a time, they were considered the cash crop of the ocean. Spanish fishing vessels…
October 28, 2008
Comes courtesy of David Brooks:
This [financial[ meltdown is not just a financial event, but also a cultural one. It's a big, whopping reminder that the human mind is continually trying to perceive things that aren't true, and not perceiving them takes enormous effort.
For more, see here.
October 27, 2008
There's something poignant about the possibility that one of the reasons obese people eat too much is because they are unable to take pleasure in the taste of their food. But according to a new study published in Science, that's exactly what happens:
The dorsal striatum plays a role in consummatory…
October 27, 2008
Last week, I reviewed Buyology, a new book on neuromarketing, in the Washington Post. Although the book is based on a large, privately funded neuromarketing experiment, I wasn't so wowed by the science:
If "Buy-ology" itself is any indication, these companies got ripped off. It's not that the book…
October 25, 2008
Click here to hear the only known recording of Virginia Woolf's voice. A few thoughts: 1) What an Oxbridge accent! So posh and crisp. This is the voice I always imagined for Mrs. Dalloway, but then I guess Woolf had a few servants as well. 2) Isn't it amazing that we only have a single audio…
October 24, 2008
Over at Mind Matters, I've got an interview with Sheldon Solomon. We talk about fear, death, the fear of death, and politics. In this excerpt, Solomon describes an extremely clever experiment, in which he primed judges to think about death and then observed how this affected their judicial…
October 23, 2008
There's a new scientific appreciation for the importance of self-control. This trend began with Walter Mischel's astonishing marshmallow experiments, in which the ability of a four-year old to resist the temptation of a second marshmallow turned out to be a better predictor of future academic…
October 23, 2008
Apologies for the radio silence - I've been on vacation. This time, I actually tried to stay away from the internet while away. My online withdrawal period actually went though several distinct psychological stages. (And yes, I know such stages don't actually exist.) At first, I experienced a weird…
October 21, 2008
Richard Powers, one of my favorite novelists, just got his entire genome sequenced and wrote about the results for GQ:
I come from a long line of folks, on my mother's side, with congenital difficulty making choices. My father's family, on the other hand, are born snap deciders. This time the…
October 20, 2008
Dashi, a Japanese stock made from kelp and dried fish, is going mainstream. It's suddenly appearing on the menus of all sorts of fancy restaurants, many of which have little to do with Japanese food. The reason? Umami.
"It's basically water, but fantastically perfumed water," said Eric Ripert, the…
October 16, 2008
Another way that credit cards dupe the brain into spending way too much money on interest payments:
New research by the University of Warwick reveals that many credit card customers become fixated on the level of minimum payments given on credit card bills. The mere presence of a minimum payment is…
October 13, 2008
Michael Pollan makes so much sense it's actually a little painful, since such basic agricultural reforms will never, ever get through Congress. At some point in the twentieth century, American lawmakers forgot that the sole goal of farming wasn't efficiency; high-fructose corn syrup should not be…
October 13, 2008
Over at Mind Matters, I've got an interview with Dr. Robert Burton on the danger of certainty and its relevance during a presidential election:
LEHRER: To what extent does the certainty bias come into play during a presidential election? It seems like we all turn into such partisan hacks every four…
October 9, 2008
At any given moment, the cortex is riven by disagreement, as rival bits of tissue contradict each other. Different brain areas think different things for different reasons; all those mental components stuffed inside our head are constantly fighting for influence and attention. In this sense, the…
October 7, 2008
A fundamental problem in the financial markets right now - a problem that's often traced to the failure of Lehman Brothers last month - is the breakdown of trust. Because financial institutions don't "trust" the solvency of other institutions and corporations, they aren't willing to lend money. The…
October 6, 2008
I'm pretty sure that if Dante had known about locked-in syndrome he would have rewritten the chapter in the Inferno devoted to the ninth circle of hell. In the most recent Esquire, Joshua Foer has an excellent profile of Erik Ramsey, who suffered a devastating injury to his brain stem, leaving him…
October 6, 2008
My latest article in the Boston Globe Ideas section is on presidential decision-making and the virtues of metacognition, or being able to think about thinking:
For the last eight years, America has had a president with an audacious approach to making decisions. "I'm a gut player. I rely on my…
October 4, 2008
Last night, while stuck in an airport (the inevitable delay), I decided to get a Wendy's milkshake. Not a particularly noteworthy decision - when traveling, I like to subsist entirely on fast food - but it occurred to me, while standing in line, that I wasn't actually hungry. At all. (I'd just…