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
August 11, 2008
This seems a wee bit reductive to me, but it's still an interesting hypothesis:
One of the more intriguing patterns in psychology is that different cultures are characterized by different personality types. A team of psychologists has proposed a new explanation: the legacy of disease. They matched…
August 8, 2008
Dr. Felix Rey was the first doctor to diagnose Vincent Van Gogh with epilepsy, after the artist was hospitalized following this bizarre incident:
When Gauguin left their house, van Gogh followed and approached him with an open razor, was repelled, went home, and cut off part of his left earlobe,…
August 7, 2008
I was on the Brian Lehrer show (no relation) this morning talking about insight, firefighters and the right hemisphere. Give it a listen. And I'm curious how readers engineer their own insights. Warm showers? Long walks? Richard Feynman preferred strip clubs, a cognitive strategy I have yet to test.
August 7, 2008
One of the great themes of post-Darwinian science is the inter-relatedness of life. From the perspective of our neurons, there is little difference between a human and a rat, or even a sea slug. All animals use the same ionic cells and the same neurotransmitters. Pain receptors in different species…
August 6, 2008
This ridiculously adorable video cheered me up today:
Via Ezra Klein and Zooillogix
August 6, 2008
Over at Mind Matters we recently featured an interesting article by Walter Sinnott-Armstrong and Adina Roskies (two philosophers at Dartmouth) reviewing a recent paper by Joshua Greene, et. al. The paper tested the dual-process model of morality, which argues that every moral decision is the result…
August 5, 2008
The history of science is littered with surprising discoveries that forever changed our conception of the unvierse and ourselves. The earth is a sphere, even though it appears flat. Life has no designer, even though it looks designed. But this may be the most surprising discovery yet, a fact that…
August 4, 2008
Razib has a super-interesting post on the prevalence of obesity among individuals of mixed race. His post was based on this paper:
The sample included 215,000 adults who reported one or more ethnicities, height, weight, and other characteristics through a mailed survey. ... The highest age-…
August 4, 2008
Robert Krulwich had a really lovely piece on Weekend Edition discussing Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, split-brain patients and the emergent self. Much of the piece was drawn from my chapter on Woolf in Proust Was A Neuroscientist.
Here is how I summarize the paradox in the book, using the…
July 31, 2008
A mule is a biological hybrid, an offspring of a male donkey and a female horse. According to a new paper, all of this cross-pollination has real benefits: mules are significantly smarter than either of their parents. No regression to the mean here:
Six of each animal were shown sets of two food…
July 31, 2008
One of the lessons of my article on insight (based largely on this research) is that mind wandering isn't necessarily a bad thing, at least if you want to tap into the obscure associations prevalent in the right hemisphere:
Schooler's research has also led him to reconsider the bad reputation of…
July 30, 2008
The devious slogan for the New York State lottery is "All you need is a dollar and a dream." Such state lotteries are a regressive form of taxation, since the vast majority of lottery consumers are low-income. As David Brooks notes:
Twenty percent of Americans are frequent players, spending about $…
July 30, 2008
Ed Yong has an excellent summary of a new experiment simulating the natural evolution of an artificial language as it's passed from one person to another. Every time we use a language we are subtly bending the rules and words to fit the contours of the brain:
Together with Kenny Smith at…
July 29, 2008
Sheena Iyengar has done some very cool studies on the debilitating effects of excessive choice. In one experiment, she ushered some undergraduates into a room with a variety of Godiva chocolates on a table. The students were then given vivid descriptions of each candy. They learned, for example,…
July 29, 2008
I was on The Takeaway this morning talking about irrational voters, Peter Jennings and why trying to multi-task is like running Microsoft Vista on an old computer.
July 28, 2008
Do you scoff at those pale Tofu dogs in the health food aisles of the supermarket? Are you one of those people who taunt vegans by talking about Big Macs? A new study suggests that you should think about biting your tongue: According to the researchers, how we feel about a sausage, regardless of…
July 25, 2008
The latest report on home sales is bleak:
Sales of new homes fell in June for the seventh time in the past eight months, more proof that the worst housing slump in decades is getting deeper.
The Commerce Department reported Friday that sales of new single-family homes dropped by 0.6 percent last…
July 24, 2008
A new paper in one of my favorite journals, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, tries to reverse-engineer the tricks of magicians to learn about the blind spots of the brain. Wired Science explains:
Magic tricks may look simple, but they exploit cognitive patterns that scientists are only beginning to…
July 24, 2008
John Donne, in this stanza from The Ecstasy, seems to anticipate the double helix:
Our hands were firmly cemented
By a fast balm which thence did spring
Our eye-beams twisted, and did thread
Our eyes upon one double string;
So to intergraft our hands, as yet
Was all the means to make us one,
And…
July 23, 2008
Funny stuff from McSweeney's:
General relativity is your high-school girlfriend all grown up. Man, she is amazing. You sort of regret not keeping in touch. She hates quantum mechanics for obscure reasons.
Cosmology is the girl that doesn't really date, but has lots of hot friends. Some people date…
July 23, 2008
Over at Mind Matters, the expert blog I curate at Scientific American, we're currently featuring a really interesting article by On Amir on the cognitive cost of making decisions:
For instance, it's long been recognized that strenuous cognitive tasks--such as taking the SAT--can make it harder to…
July 23, 2008
Look up charming in a dictionary and I'm pretty sure you'll see this video:
Because we like to link everything to the brain over here at the Frontal Cortex, it's worth mentioning that the number four also represents the outer limits of our numerical brain. Here's Stanislas Dehaene, a leading…
July 22, 2008
This kid is a poster child for deliberate practice:
Marc Yu, a 9-year-old piano prodigy from Pasadena, Calif., recently played at a benefit for victims of the earthquake in Sichuan, China. And he didn't play "Row, Row, Row Your Boat." He played a piece that Chopin wrote for victims of the Polish-…
July 22, 2008
I've got an article in the latest New Yorker (not online) on the neuroscience of insight. I begin the article with the harrowing story of Wag Dodge and the Mann Gulch fire, before describing the research of Mark Jung Beeman, John Kounios and Earl Miller:
There is something inherently mysterious…
July 21, 2008
David Carr, a media columnist for the New York Times, was addicted to crack for several years in the late 1980's. In the Times Magazine (and in his new book) he tells the story of his own investigation into his junkie years, as he tries to understand how he let a chemical nearly ruin his life. It's…
July 18, 2008
Whenever I happen to watch some talking heads on a cable news channel - usually while stuck in an airport - I'm always impressed by how mistaken the basic premise of the conversation is. The pundits will waste lots of words on how Obama's pivot on FISA might turn off his liberal base, or how McCain…
July 18, 2008
I visited the Cambridge Google offices last month and talked about Escoffier, umami, Kanye West and the plasticity of dopamine neurons:
July 17, 2008
Speaking of data visualization, a reader sent along this link to some fabulous examples. Each of these images, according to artist and creator Jason Salavon, is composed of "100 unique commemorative photographs culled from the internet. The final compositions are arrived at using both the mean and…
July 17, 2008
One way to understand the collapse of the real estate bubble (and our current financial mess) is as a massive case of bad decision-making. The mistakes, of course, were made by many different people and organizations: the investment banks who bought subprime debt, the credit rating agencies who…
July 16, 2008
Steven Levitt writes about the difficulty of judging wine:
On Tuesday afternoons we had wine tastings. I asked if I could be allowed the opportunity to conduct one of these wine tastings "blind" to see what we could learn from sampling wines without first knowing what we were drinking. Everyone…