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
July 16, 2008
Olivia Judson believes that it's time to jettison "Darwinism" from our vocabulary:
Why is this [Darwinism] a problem? Because it's all grossly misleading. It suggests that Darwin was the beginning and the end, the alpha and omega, of evolutionary biology, and that the subject hasn't changed much in…
July 16, 2008
This is a fourth culture I can believe in:
Google has a lot more on how the video was made using 64 rotating lasers (no cameras!) and some cool data visualization programs. (They also released the raw data for the point clouds, so anybody can, at least in theory, create their own visual remix of…
July 15, 2008
What you need is a distraction from the drip of bad economic news. (Just remember: the stock market is a random walk that, over the long-term, has an upward slope. Besides, investors who do nothing to their stock portfolio - they don't buy or sell a single stock - outperform the average "active"…
July 15, 2008
Hit songs are getting wordier:
Average word count of top-ten songs during the 1960s: 176
Average last year: 436
That's from the latest Harper's Index, via Marginal Revolution. I think this trend is pretty clearly a result of hip-hop and rap. Compare some Phil Spector Wall of Sound single - say, "Be…
July 14, 2008
Why do poor people spend so much money on brand-name items and flashy status symbols? The answer is power. Those Calvin Klein boxers are a desperate attempt at compensation. Here's Kevin Lewis of the Globe Ideas section:
If people low on the socioeconomic ladder sometimes buy things beyond their…
July 14, 2008
I loved WALL-E. In my opinion, it's the best Pixar movie yet, and I was a huge fan of Ratatouille. While the movie has an obvious environmental subtext - we are destroying the earth with our love of disposable things - I was most taken with its subtle endorsement of Darwin. And no, I'm not talking…
July 11, 2008
The latest Seed has a very interesting article on the complicated geometry underlying Western music, and the intuitive mathematical understanding demonstrated by composers:
The shapes of the space of chords we have described also reveal deep connections between a wide range of musical genres. It…
July 10, 2008
Nature has a really interesting article on the sheer difficulty (impossibility?) of finding the genetic underpinnings of mental illness:
Finding genes involved in psychiatric conditions is proving to be particularly intractable because it is still unclear whether the various diagnoses are actually…
July 10, 2008
From the new experimental philosophy reader, edited by Joshua Knobe and Shaun Nichols:
It used to be commonplace that the discipline of philosophy was deeply concerned with questions about the human condition. Philosophers thought about human beings and how their minds worked. They took an interest…
July 10, 2008
Is it just me or are the mosquitoes extra bad this year? I have a feeling that people would care even more about climate change if, instead of talking about rising sea levels, environmentalists started talking about swarms of mosquitoes. A warmer earth will be an itchier place.
On a related note, a…
July 9, 2008
I don't know how I feel about this new trend of giving household pets human anti-depressants. Here's James Vlahos in the Times Magazine:
The practice of prescribing medications designed for humans to animals has grown substantially over the past decade and a half, and pharmaceutical companies have…
July 9, 2008
I've got a profile of ecologist Jianguo Liu in the latest Conservation Magazine:
When the Wolong Nature Reserve was established in Southwestern China in 1975, it was hailed as a landmark achievement of the environmental movement. The reserve, which covers more than 200,000 hectares, contains more…
July 9, 2008
One of the biggest misconceptions of natural selection is that it mandates nastiness, that the pressure to survive and multiply requires a ruthless sort of amorality. In other words, we are all Hobbesian brutes, driven to survive by selfish genes.
Fortunately, our psychological reality is much…
July 8, 2008
Some new evidence suggesting that children aren't such bundles of joy:
Sociologists are discovering that children may not make parents happier and that childless adults, contrary to popular stereotypes, may often be more contented than people with kids.
Parents "definitely experienced more…
July 8, 2008
Adam Gopnik has a great New Yorker article (not online) on the genius and wickedness of G.K. Chesterton. Although he wrote some masterful books - my favorites are The Man Who Was Thursday and the Father Brown detective stories - Chesterton was also a consistent antisemitic, prone to tedious…
July 7, 2008
Steve Shapin, a historian of science at Harvard, argues that the romantic notion of scientists lusting after truth and not worldly riches is a wee bit oversimplified:
IDEAS: Are we wrong to think of scientists as academics engaged in the noble pursuit of knowledge?
SHAPIN: Well, I wouldn't deny…
July 7, 2008
This is a heartwarming story about the power of kindness to change behavior and rewire instinct. Michael Vick, the imprisoned QB, trained his dogs to be cruel, nasty and brutish. (The dogs that didn't take to fighting were beaten, tortured and killed.) Most animal experts assumed that Vick's pit…
July 6, 2008
I've got an article in the Boston Globe Ideas section on the new science of depression:
Prozac is one of the most successful drugs of all time. Since its introduction as an antidepressant more than 20 years ago, Prozac has been prescribed to more than 54 million people around the world, and…
July 4, 2008
You know what makes me proud to be an American? The fact that the black presidential candidate with the funny African-Muslim name is leading in the polls against the white aviator war hero married to a beer heiress. And I'm not just saying that because I want universal health care and a progressive…
July 3, 2008
The ideological swings of scientists between age-groups is striking:
What do you think explains this shift? And what other differences do you notice between young and old scientists? (I realize all such statements will be absurd over-generalizations, but that's the point.)
Update: See Razib for a…
July 3, 2008
Zadie Smith, writing in The Believer, offers future novelists some advice:
When you finish your novel, if money is not a desperate priority, if you do not need to sell it at once or be published that very second - put it in a drawer. For as long as you can manage. A year of more is ideal - but even…
July 2, 2008
The thrill I get from watching Michael Phelps swim is the same thrill I get from watching Tiger Woods put for birdie on the 18th hole or from reading 1930's Auden: the impossible isn't just made possible: these guys make the impossible look easy. So I was struck by this paragraph in an old profile…
July 2, 2008
This new article on the website of the NY Times listing "the 11 best foods you aren't eating" is a perfect example of nutritionism run amok, full of dubious claims like this:
Pumpkin seeds: The most nutritious part of the pumpkin and packed with magnesium; high levels of the mineral are associated…
July 1, 2008
An Onion classic:
Is there no morality in science? Last night I tried to have a barbecue on my back patio and I ran inside before the spicy shish-kabobs were even half-grilled because of the mosquitoes. With all that chemical engineering going on today, with all that military technology, I should…
July 1, 2008
Another day, another sinking stock market. The Dow has officially entered bear territory, which is defined by a drop of 20 percent or more. Many variables are responsible for the financial malaise, from rising gas prices to a weakening job market, but the root cause seems to be the busting of the…
July 1, 2008
Via Vaughan, over at MindHacks, a great quote on the utility of social psychology from Dan Gilbert:
Psychologists have a penchant for irrational exuberances, and whenever we discover something new we feel the need to discard everything old. Social psychology is the exception. We kept cognition…
June 30, 2008
I've written before about the dangers of transparency and medical technology, at least when it comes to diagnosing back pain. Simply put, doctors tend to assume that any imaging technology with better resolution will lead to better diagnoses. But that's often not the case:
A large study published…
June 30, 2008
This makes me feel very lonely:
The "Pillars of Creation" may be the most iconic Hubble photograph ever taken. "Located in the Eagle Nebula, the pillars are clouds of molecular hydrogen, light years in length, where new stars are being born," says Aguilar. "However, recent discoveries indicate…
June 27, 2008
Somewhere, Walt Whitman is smiling:
From "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry":
FLOOD-TIDE below me! I watch you face to face;
Clouds of the west! sun there half an hour high! I see you also face to face.
Crowds of men and women attired in the usual costumes! how curious you are to me!
On the ferry-boats,…
June 27, 2008
Language is the stuff of thought. I'm reminded of this truism every time I sip a glass of wine and some pretentious snob (usually me) insists on saying something about the Chianti Classico smelling like cherries, or how the New Zealand sauvignon blanc exudes the perfume of pineapple. As soon as I…