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
October 2, 2008
One of the enduring mysteries of neurogenesis - the process of creating new neurons in the brain - is the purpose of all these new cells. After all, one of the reasons scientists believed that neurogenesis didn't exist (this was the scientific dogma for most of the 20th century) was that newborn…
September 30, 2008
Over the next few days, lots of people are going to be poring over their investment portfolio, trying to figure out which stocks to keep and which stocks to sell. Unfortunately, many of these investors will make the exact same mistake, causing them to lose vast sums of money over the long term.…
September 29, 2008
The hypocrisy is dazzling. Charles Murray (of Bell Curve fame) just wrote a book arguing that the vast majority of American college students shouldn't actually be attending college, since they lack the cognitive ability to "deal with college-level material." Instead, he argues that these people…
September 25, 2008
I couldn't sleep last night. As far as I can tell, there was no particular reason for my insomnia. I wasn't stressed, or anxious, or caffeinated, or sick. My mind was tired, but my brain just wasn't in the sleeping mood. And no, I hadn't been talking on a cell phone.
For me, one of the most…
September 24, 2008
Walter Pater famously declared that "all art aspires to the condition of music." What he meant is that music is able to work on our feelings directly; no ideas interfere with its emotions. I'd amend that slightly, and say that art should also aspire to the condition of architecture, especially when…
September 24, 2008
The power of Warren Buffett is impressive. He decides to invest a few billion in Goldman Sachs and panicked investors calm down. And why not? Nobody has an investing record that can even come close to comparing with Buffett's record: he is the lone outlier of Wall Street. According to most…
September 24, 2008
A little housekeeping. First, I've got a new website! The best part is the article archive. I've also got a few speaking gigs in the next month, in case you happen to be in the area. On Friday, I'll be at the Idea Festival in Louisville. On October 1, I'm at Georgia Tech. I'll be at the GAIN…
September 23, 2008
Over at BLDGBLOG, Geoffrey makes an astute observation about how the latest consumer technologies have a way of becoming metaphors for the mind. Before the brain was a binary code running on three pounds of cellular microchips, it was an impressive calculator, or a camera, or a blank slate. In…
September 23, 2008
This is interesting stuff. As G.K. Chesterton is said to have once said: "When people stop believing in God, they don't believe in nothing - they believe in anything."
"What Americans Really Believe," a comprehensive new study released by Baylor University yesterday, shows that traditional…
September 22, 2008
Last week, I had a short article in Play, the NY Times sports magazine. It was on how quarterbacks make decisions and why the Wonderlic is such a waste of time:
Three and a half seconds: that's how long, on average, a quarterback has to make a decision about where to throw the ball. So, how does he…
September 22, 2008
I'm now officially the most annoying backseat driver ever. I was annoying before, but ever since I read Tom Vanderbilt's Traffic (a great book) I've turned into a Mr. Know It All, offering pearls of wisdom on everything from how to merge (be selfish) to the ideal type of intersection (the…
September 19, 2008
David Foster Wallace on the increasing specialization of knowledge, or what I call the acronym boom:
Things are vastly more compartmentalized now than they were up through, say, the Renaissance. And more specialized, and more freighted with all kinds of special context. There's no way we'd expect a…
September 19, 2008
Wall Street sure is moody. Forty-eight hours ago we were on the verge of a financial apocalypse. Now, traders are engaging in record breaking market surges. While there certainly has been lots of news that helps explain these dramatic shifts, I wonder if a significant part of the movement is…
September 18, 2008
In the new Atlantic, Ross Douthat argues that porn is a moral slippery slope, and is part of the adultery continuum:
Yes, adultery is inevitable, but it's never been universal in the way that pornography has the potential to become--at least if we approach the use of hard-core porn as a normal…
September 18, 2008
One of the most depressing things about an election cycle is the way it splits America into a series of demographic and ideological tribes. There's red states and blue states, whites and blacks, liberals and conservatives, hockey moms and soccer dads. Cultural commonalities are replaced with…
September 17, 2008
What a bleak day on Wall Street. Although the financial contagion long ago spread beyond subprime mortgages, it's worth remembering that this all began when lenders decided that millions of people could afford loans that were actually unaffordable, at least over the long-term. Why did people accept…
September 17, 2008
Michael Ruhlman says to not waste money on store bought stock:
I cannot say this strongly or loudly enough: DO NOT use canned stock/broth. Use WATER instead. I repeat. You DO NOT NEED to buy that crappy can of Swanson's low sodium chicken broth! It will HURT your food. Use water instead. When…
September 17, 2008
In response to my post yesterday which argued that Democrats and Republicans are both vulnerable to what's politely referred to as "motivated reasoning" - in other words, we're all partisan hacks - some commenters objected. They pointed out that the actual study I was discussing found that…
September 16, 2008
Yesterday, we looked at some new research that found that when conservatives were exposed to evidence demonstrating the falsity of a partisan belief - such as a report demonstrating that Iraq didn't have WMD, or that lowering taxes doesn't increase government revenue - they became more convinced…
September 16, 2008
How much can we learn about disease from studying genetics? A few months ago, Nature published an interesting article on the possible impossibility of ever finding the faulty genes behind many mental illnesses. Today, Nicholas Wade in the Times had an interesting article on the skeptical geneticist…
September 15, 2008
I think this experiment helps explains a rather disturbing amount of our political discourse. What it neatly demonstrates is that the main reason so many campaigns traffic in dishonest allegations and pseudofacts is that, when it comes to voters, the facts don't really matter. Most of us are just…
September 15, 2008
Infinite Jest was one of those books that changed my life as a geeky adolescent and then proved to be rather unreadable a few years later. Nevertheless, I've always made a point of reading everything DFW ever wrote. I think of him whenever I cram a digression into a footnote, or delight in the…
September 15, 2008
This makes me sad:
When gasoline prices shot up this year, Peggy Seemann thought about saving the $10 she spends weekly on lottery tickets.
But the prospect that the $10 could become $100 million or more was too appealing. So rather than stop buying Mega Millions tickets, Ms. Seemann, 50, who lives…
September 15, 2008
A few months ago, when it looked as if the financial maelstrom had mostly passed - after the Bear Stearns bailout, things calmed down - I decided to write an article about Read Montague and the weird habits of dopamine neurons. While these brain cells are often used to explain the computation of…
September 12, 2008
I would love to watch this sport in person:
Goalball participants compete in teams of three, and try to throw a ball that has bells embedded in it, into the opponents' goal. They must use the sound of the bell to judge the position and movement of the ball. Games consist of two 10 minute halves.…
September 12, 2008
Did you know that every time you eat a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for lunch instead of a meat based sandwich you reduce your carbon footprint by more than two pounds? (I love it when environmentalism affirms my own habits.) That's about 40 percent of the savings that are achieved from driving…
September 12, 2008
In recent days, there has been a lot of discussion about Sarah Palin's lack of experience in foreign policy. These criticisms all depend on the same assumption: that knowing more about foreign policy is always better. (Experience is typically used as a stand-in for knowledge, so when people say…
September 11, 2008
I was living in Manhattan on 9/11. I can vividly recall the horrifying details of the day. I can still smell the acrid odor of burnt plastic and the pall of oily smoke and the feeling of disbelief, the sense that history had just pivoted in a tragic direction. Such vivid, visceral, emotional…
September 10, 2008
Let's say I flash you a picture containing a mixture of blue and yellow dots for one-fifth of a second. You clearly don't have time to count the dots - you barely have time to register the image - but I ask you to guesstimate the ratio of blue to yellow dots anyways. Sounds like a pretty…
September 10, 2008
This makes me sad:
If ever there was a car made for the times, this would seem to be it: a sporty subcompact that seats five, offers a navigation system, and gets a whopping 65 miles to the gallon. Oh yes, and the car is made by Ford Motor (F), known widely for lumbering gas hogs.
Ford's 2009…