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
June 26, 2008
There's an interesting review on prediction errors and temporal difference learning theory in the latest Trends in Cognitive Sciences. (Really, it's fascinating stuff.) But I don't want to talk today about the content of the article. Instead, I want to discuss its form.
The vast, vast majority of…
June 25, 2008
Here are three food-related items I've been enjoying lately:
1) Fennel Pollen: Like all great spices, the flavor of wild fennel pollen eludes adjectives. It's like a fennel seed, only much more so. I sprinkle it on everything from roasted wild salmon to pasta with zucchini, basil and mozzarella. (…
June 25, 2008
This is the car I covet:
It's been a long day for our adorable yellow test car. This morning we headed for Think's factory in Aurskog, some 40 miles into the bluegrass Scandinavian countryside, with about an 85% charge in the car's advanced sodium-cell battery. But Ladehaug -- who is directionally…
June 25, 2008
If William James were alive today, I'm pretty sure that he'd be an experimental philosopher. (He'd also be a cognitive psychologist, a public intellectual in the mold of Richard Rorty and a damn fine essayist, filling the back pages of the New Yorker and New York Review of Books with incisive…
June 24, 2008
I was on the Takeaway last week talking about this study:
We examined the role of serotonin transporter (5-HTT) and oxytocin receptor (OXTR) genes in explaining differences in sensitive parenting in a community sample of 159 Caucasian, middle-class mothers with their 2-year-old toddlers at risk for…
June 24, 2008
In a recent issue of Nature, Nikos Logothetis, director of the Max Plank Institute for Biological Cybernetics, wrote some surprisingly harsh sentences about the experimental limitations of fMRI. The piece is especially noteworthy because Logothetis has probably done more than anyone else to…
June 23, 2008
There are a few writers who manage to trigger a contradictory mixture of feelings in me: the joy of reading their prose is fused with the mild anguish of not having written their prose. It's one part status anxiety, a dash of jealousy and a big heaping of aesthetic appreciation. Atul Gawande is one…
June 23, 2008
Robert Krulwich, speaking at the Caltech Commencement, issues a cri de coeur for the importance of stories, even (especially!) when speaking about science:
Because talking about science, telling science stories to regular folks like me and your parents, is not a trivial thing. Scientists need to…
June 19, 2008
It's a truism that the favorite philosopher of every scientist is Karl Popper. (In my own experience, this truism is mostly true.) Popper, or so the story goes, stood up for empirical fact when the post-modernists were descending into Deleuze and Derrida and difference. His popularity among…
June 18, 2008
From Rachel Herz's quite interesting The Scent of Desire:
In one study that contrasted the trauma of being blinded or becoming anosmic [losing you sense of smell] after an accident, it was found that those who were blinded initially felt much more traumatized by their loss than those who had lost…
June 17, 2008
Like so many golf fans, I'd never even thought about watching golf on television until Tiger Woods. I don't play the game and the images of all those manicured greens and hushed crowds always struck me as incredibly boring. Why would I want to watch a game that seems to consist mostly of people…
June 17, 2008
I really enjoyed The Death of Vishnu when it came out several years ago. It was a Calvinoesque exploration of a single Bombay apartment dwelling, as refracted through the prism of a dying peasant. But I had no idea that the author, Manil Suri, was actually an academic mathematician:
Q. ARE THERE…
June 16, 2008
When I first got a Prius, I was tempted to cover the rear bumper with liberal decals, like "Support Local Farms!" (that's on my bike) or "Women for Obama!" (a popular Prius sticker here in New Hampshire). I wanted to embrace my inner cliche, to see what it felt like to be a right-wing talking point…
June 16, 2008
M. Night Shyamalan, the director of the vaguely anti-evolution (and thoroughly mediocre) film The Happening, uses the brain to discuss the limits of science:
There's so much unexplained stuff. I don't quite understand the scientific explanation of the placebo effect. What is the core of that? The…
June 13, 2008
It happens to me every time: I tell myself that it's just a game, that these overpaid basketball superstars don't really have any loyalty to a particular team, place, city, etc., that I really shouldn't care about the outcome of the NBA finals. And yet and yet: despite my self-awareness, I can't…
June 12, 2008
At first glance, it's hard to think of a more frivolous form of culture than the daily soap opera. It's pure and delicious escapism. And yet, at least in Brazil, soap operas have powerfully influenced family planning, according to a new study:
What are the effects of television, and of role models…
June 12, 2008
Bookslut has a really interesting interview with Jeff Warren, author of The Head Trip:
Q: It turns out sleep is more interesting than we usually expect -- and that it even has a history! What are some key misconceptions about sleep?
A: I would like to spiel about dreaming for a moment if you don't…
June 12, 2008
Over at Marginal Revolution, a commenter asks Tyler a great question:
I wanted to ask for survival tips in case I am unexpectedly transported to a random location in Europe (say for instance current France/Benelux/Germany) in the year 1000 AD (plus or minus 200 years). I assume that such…
June 11, 2008
I wandered into the ICP a few weeks ago, wandering amid Midtown with an hour to spare. I ended up transfixed by an exhibit called Bill Wood's Business:
The Bill Wood Photo Company supplied local snap shooters and amateur photographers with cameras, flash bulbs, accessories, and quality photo…
June 11, 2008
In the latest Atlantic, John Staddon, a professor of psychology at Duke, has an article on the dangers of road signs and speed limits:
The American system of traffic control, with its many signs and stops, and with its specific rules tailored to every bend in the road, has had the unintended…
June 11, 2008
A few weeks ago, I wrote an article on various explanations for home field advantage. One of the more interesting tidbits I learned was this:
Professional teams, however, seem to be better adjusted to life on the road. (The chartered planes and fancy hotels probably help.) A 1986 analysis of nearly…
June 10, 2008
David Brooks' column today is filled with some depressing financial facts:
Between 1989 and 2001, credit-card debt nearly tripled, soaring from $238 billion to $692 billion. By last year, it was up to $937 billion, the report said.
State governments aggressively hawk their lottery products, which…
June 9, 2008
An eloquent elegy to age, written by Steven Johnson on his fortieth birthday:
One of the things that's always stuck with me from my Mind Wide Open research is that human beings vary predictably in their perception of time as they age. Time literally seems to go faster the older you get--not just in…
June 9, 2008
Given the weather on the Eastern seaboard - it's one of those hot, sultry days where you wait for a thunderstorm to purge the humidity from the air - I decided to do a quick literature search for the effects of heat on cognition. But as so often happens when I play with vague search terms on Google…
June 7, 2008
Dave Munger has a great post on how fMRI images bias the brain. The researchers asked 156 students at Colorado State University to evaluate three different summaries of brain research. As you can probably guess (especially if you're familiar with this research) the students gave significantly…
June 6, 2008
Kottke links to some early reviews of cinema. Needless to say, hyperbole ruled the day. As one critic proclaimed:
Photography has ceased to record immobility. It perpetuates the image of movement. When these gadgets are in the hands of the public, when anyone can photograph the ones who are dear to…
June 6, 2008
Humans are exquisitely social animals, and yet we're vulnerable to some pretty stunning flaws in social cognition. Unfortunately, most of these flaws are on full display during a presidential campaign. Consider the false rumor, which can influence our beliefs even when it has been debunked. The…
June 5, 2008
It's been recognized for a few years that drinking diet sodas can actually cause weight gain, since the phony sweetness of artificial sweeteners disrupts the "predictive relationship" between a sweet taste and caloric satisfaction. In other words, people drink a diet Coke when they are craving a…
June 5, 2008
Allegra Goodman is a marvelous writer. Intuition, her last novel, was an uncannily accurate depiction of the slog of a science lab. It captured the epic tedium of empiricism, the way experiments are ambiguous even when they work. (And they so rarely work!) I bring her up now because she just wrote…
June 4, 2008
Sometimes, when I walk through international airports, I get a little sad about the homogeneity of homo sapiens. I guess it's an inevitable by-product of globalization and modernity, but I can't help but wish that we didn't all drink Starbucks and wear Nike shoes and listen to Rihanna on our iPods…