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.
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Posts by this author
September 9, 2008
Oliver Sacks, writing on mania and manic depressive disorder in the New York Review of Books:
One may call it mania, madness, or psychosis--a chemical imbalance in the brain--but it presents itself as energy of a primordial sort. Greenberg likens it to "being in the presence of a rare force of…
September 9, 2008
What a vivid example of human irrationality:
An erroneous headline that flashed across trading screens Monday, saying United had filed for a second bankruptcy, sent the airline's stock plummeting.
United Airlines shares fell to about $3 from more than $12 in less than an hour before trading was…
September 8, 2008
The great Laurie Colwin, on learning to cook and eat without salt:
After a few weeks I felt I had gotten the hang of my new regime. I had discovered saltless bread, smoked mozarella, green peppercorns and fresh sage. I felt I might venture out into the real world for a meal. I did, and I was…
September 5, 2008
We shouldn't be surprised when every presidential election - even an election between two candidates committed to some vague post-partisan future - veers into identity politics and the culture war. I can't help but watch these conventions through the lens of Jane Goodall, as a gathering of social…
September 4, 2008
Razib makes an excellent and obvious point:
I do not believe scientists are particularly rational people as compared to the normal human. Because the average scientist has a higher IQ than the average artist I am willing to grant marginally higher rationality to an average scientist. Their ability…
September 4, 2008
Is it football season already? It seems like I just got over the epic disappointment of the Superbowl. (Yes, I'm a Pats fan) So, in honor of football season, I think it's worth highlighting one of the major trends to affect the sport over the last few decades: the ascent of the passing game. Since…
September 3, 2008
So there's been a lot of talk about how John McCain's choice of Sarah Palin for VP demonstrates the danger of trusting your instincts and making important decisions with your gut. But I think such a conclusion is unfair - not to McCain, but to our very own brain.
After all, one of the major…
September 3, 2008
Panhandling is a surprisingly lucrative profession:
Anecdotal surveys by journalists and police, and even testimony by panhandlers themselves, suggest that begging can yield anywhere from $20 to $100 a day--though police in Coos Bay, Oregon, found that local panhandlers were taking in as much as $…
September 2, 2008
I love these experiments, if only because everyone assumes that the basic finding doesn't apply to them. It's only these other simpletons who can't tell the difference between red and white wine, or cheap plonk and fancy Bordeaux, or strawberry and chocolate yogurt:
In one recent test,…
September 2, 2008
On the last day of every golf tournament, Tiger Woods insists on wearing a bright red polo shirt. Woods says the habit is merely superstition, but new research suggests that his fashion sense might actually come with athletic benefits. A paper published this month in Psychological Science reports…
September 2, 2008
You've got to feel very sorry for Bristol Palin. The poor teenager isn't running for political office and yet she's the subject of two front page stories in the NY Times today. All of a sudden, every talking head on the cable news is wondering how her pregnancy will influence the election. Is this…
September 1, 2008
Sorry for the radio silence - I've been out and about doing some reporting. But I've got a story in the Sunday Boston Globe on the benefits of daydreaming and the default network:
Teresa Belton, a research associate at East Anglia University in England, first got interested in daydreaming while…
August 26, 2008
The latest Men's Vogue has a rather interesting article (not online) by Jay McInerney on a small group of real estate moguls who like to drink very, very expensive wine. For these oenophiles, a 1982 Romanee-Conti is a young wine - even their champagne is typically several decades old - and a $500…
August 26, 2008
Once upon a time, back when the Human Genome Project threatened to unravel the mystery of human nature - every aspect of individuality would be reduced to a SNIP - the Nature/Nurture debate seemed like the most hotly contested question in science. Are personality traits inherited or learned? To…
August 21, 2008
I've often suspected (based on a highly unsystematic series of conversations with classic New Hampshire independents) that most undecided voters are really just low-information voters, who have actually made a decision but don't quite know how to explain their decision. If you prod, you'll…
August 21, 2008
Over at Neurophilosophy, Mo highlights one of my favorite William James quotes:
The stream of thought flows on; but most of its segments fall into the bottomless abyss of oblivion. Of some, no memory survives the instant of their passage. Of others, it is confined to a few moments, hours or days.…
August 20, 2008
Here's Seth Godin:
A journalist asked me, Most people have a better standard of living today than Louis XIV did in his day. So why are so many people unhappy?
What you have doesn't make you unhappy. What you want does.
And want is created by us, the marketers.
Marketers trying to grow market share…
August 20, 2008
Over at Mind Matters, we've got an interesting article on how believing in free will can affect our ethical behavior:
In a clever new study, psychologists Kathleen Vohs at the University of Minnesota and Jonathan Schooler at the University of California at Santa Barbara tested this question by…
August 19, 2008
I had an article this weekend in the Washington Post looking at the recent spate of "age defiance" - Dara Torres, Madonna, John McCain, etc. - and some recent neuroscience research:
A s a 27-year old science writer who still gets carded at bars, I often find discussions of the aging process…
August 18, 2008
John McCain remarked last week that the hostilities in Georgia marked the "first serious crisis" since the end of the Cold War. His surrogates on the news shows have expanded on that position, as they repeat the talking point about how the world is so dangerous and full of evil.
This strategy…
August 18, 2008
The paperback version of my first book, Proust Was A Neuroscientist, is now shipping from Amazon. Needless to say, everyone should buy the book in triplicate. I'd apologize for the self-promotion, but isn't blogging just one big orgy of self-promotion?
August 18, 2008
My latest article for the Boston Globe Ideas section looks at some recent criticisms of fMRI, at least when it's misused:
The brain scan image - a silhouette of the skull, highlighted with bright splotches of primary color - has also become a staple of popular culture, a symbol of how scientific…
August 17, 2008
I really don't understand how Olympic athletes deal with the grief of losing by 1/100th of a second. That's an incomprehensible amount of time and yet it's the defining difference in the biggest event of their lives. I can only assume that, if I lost by a fraction of a second, I would have…
August 15, 2008
Over at the Times website, Harold McGee takes a question on salt and baking:
Q: Is there any truth to the old cook's adage that adding a pinch of salt brings out the sweetness in sugars? If so, can you please explain the science behind it?
Harold McGee replies: I'm not sure that salt makes sugar…
August 14, 2008
There's a very cool study in the latest Nature Neuroscience that looks at how professional basketball players make predictions about whether or not a shot will go in. Obviously, this is a key skill, as being able to anticipate the position of a basketball gives players additional time to jostle for…
August 14, 2008
It's a nightmarish scenario: after a car crash, a man is brought into a hospital with a severe injury to his frontal lobes. When he wakes up, the doctors realize that their patient is missing one crucial mental faculty: his memory has been erased. He has no idea who he is, or even where he came…
August 13, 2008
My profile of Read Montague and the dopamine prediction-error hypothesis is now online. I wanted to write this article for two main reasons. First of all, I think the dopamine story is incredibly exciting and remains one of the best examples of how subtle shifts in neural firing rates can allow the…
August 13, 2008
Sometimes, I wish America had British libel laws. This sort of dishonesty masquerading as "scholarship" makes me furious:
Mr. Corsi has released a new attack book painting Senator Barack Obama, the Democrats' presumed presidential nominee, as a stealth radical liberal who has tried to cover up "…
August 12, 2008
Some new research sheds light on why chili plants are spicy:
It has been thought that the chemicals known as capsaicinoids, which surround the seeds and give peppers their characteristic heat, are the chili's way of deterring microbes. But if so, then microbial infestation should bring selective…
August 12, 2008
I was on The Takeaway this morning talking about the ineffectiveness of Human Growth Hormone (HGH) and the potency of the placebo effect. Even though most studies demonstrate that HGH does little to enhance athletic performance, world class athletes continue to take the banned hormone. Why? Because…