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 4, 2008
Last year, some drunken teens decided to trash the house of Robert Frost. The teens are now being required by a judge to take poetry classes focusing on the verse of Frost:
Using "The Road Not Taken" and another poem as jumping-off points, Frost biographer Jay Parini hopes to show the vandals the…
June 4, 2008
Or so I say on the Bryant Park Project. We talk about tip-of-the-tongue moments, metacognition and why seeing a picture of a motorcycle will make you think about biopsies.
June 4, 2008
Over at Neurophilosophy, Mo has an excellent summary of a drug in Phase II clinical trials that tries to treat depression by up-regulating neurogenesis. In other words, it wants to ease your sadness by giving you more new brain cells. What these new brain cells do, exactly, remains a mystery, but…
June 3, 2008
The latest Wired features a list of contrarian environmental facts (organically raised cattle emit more methane gas than conventionally raised cattle, nuclear power is great, the Prius battery takes a lot of energy to make, etc.) but I was most surprised by this factoid:
Cooling a home in Arizona…
June 3, 2008
Is your right parahippocampal gyrus feeling a little tired? Then maybe you should stop being such a sarcastic smart ass. It turns out that this obscure brain area, tucked deep inside the right hemisphere, is largely responsible for the detection of sarcasm, a rather sophisticated element of social…
June 2, 2008
What psychological phenomenon do you believe in but cannot prove? I'd have to go with birth order. Having grown up with three siblings, I can't help but be convinced that my birth order (I'm the second oldest) has had a profoundly important influence on my personality.
That said, birth order is…
June 2, 2008
I've got an article in the Boston Globe Ideas section on a phenomenon that's always fascinated me: the tip-of-the-tongue moment.
Late in 1988, a 41-year-old Italian hardware clerk arrived in his doctor's office with a bizarre complaint. Although he could recognize people, and remember all sorts of…
May 30, 2008
I just wanted to thank everyone who came out to Water Taxi Beach last night to hear me, Dan Ariely and the Radio Lab team talk about the irrational brain. I had a great time. I hope you did, too. I'd never been to that "beach" before, but it's quite the spot to enjoy a beer, especially on such a…
May 30, 2008
Before I became a writer, I assumed that some people (Nabakov, Updike, Bellow, etc.) were natural writers. They were born speaking in pithy prose, with taut sentences and interesting verb choice. But then, after reading all the usual Bellow masterpieces, I started reading his early novels. And I…
May 30, 2008
Every science goes through several distinct phases. First, there is the dissection phase. The subject is broken apart into its simplest possible elements. (As Plato put it, "nature is cut at the joints, like a good butcher.") For neuroscience, this involved reducing the brain into a byzantine…
May 27, 2008
In the past year, I've spent a small fortune at the dentist. Between wisdom teeth removal, a few routine cleanings and the replacement of an old cavity, my tab has come to several thousand dollars. (Needless to say, I don't have dental insurance: I'm a freelance writer. But I do have a dental plan…
May 27, 2008
At first glance, "mindfulness" meditation practices seem completely counterintuitive. If people are suffering from pain, shouldn't they learn ways to not focus on their pain? Isn't it better to block out the negative sensations? (Repression isn't always such a bad thing...)
And yet, there's some…
May 27, 2008
The body control on this guy is utterly insane:
While there have been some interesting studies of dance and the brain, most of this research focuses on the learning of motor movements. (Not surprisingly, expert dancers exhibit increased activity in the cortical "action observation network" when…
May 27, 2008
Last Sunday, I had an article in the Boston Globe Ideas section on the underlying causes of home field advantage.
The Celtics are an extreme example of a sporting phenomenon known as home-field advantage: teams playing on their home field, or court, are significantly more likely to win. The…
May 21, 2008
Joan Acocella has an interesting article on the science of hangovers:
Hangovers also have an emotional component. Kingsley Amis, who was, in his own words, one of the foremost drunks of his time, and who wrote three books on drinking, described this phenomenon as "the metaphysical hangover": "When…
May 21, 2008
Iceland, apparently, is the happiest country on earth:
Highest birth rate in Europe + highest divorce rate + highest percentage of women working outside the home = the best country in the world in which to live. There has to be something wrong with this equation. Put those three factors together -…
May 21, 2008
There are lots of ways to combine science and art. Some of them are more problematic than others:
One of the strangest exhibits at the opening of "Design and the Elastic Mind," the very strange show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York that explores the territory where design meets science, was…
May 21, 2008
In case you find yourself in Pasadena, CA tomorrow evening, and want to hear me prattle on about art, science, veal stock and Stravinsky, I'll be speaking at the Art Center College of Design at 7:30.
May 20, 2008
There's something a little scary to me about TMS. (I should note, though, that my fear is irrational: the technology is now extremely safe. Seizures are a very, very rare side-effect of TMS. Unless, that is, you already have a brain lesion.) But this video shows just how easy it is to short-circuit…
May 20, 2008
Johann Hari decides to take Provigil (aka viagra for the brain) and reports back on the results:
I sat down and took one 200mg tablet with a glass of water. Then I pottered about the flat for an hour, listening to music and tidying up, before sitting down on the settee. I picked up a book about…
May 17, 2008
Haven't we done enough to the poor tomato? We've turned the voluptuous fruit into a pale imitation of itself: the average supermarket tomato, turned red with ethylene, tastes like, well, nothing. And now we have to genetically modify it for the sake of ketchup?
At a research farm in California,…
May 16, 2008
How would science ever progress without anomalies? Theories are useful things, but they are most useful when they're wrong, when their Newtonian predictions are off, as in the case of the Pioneer space probes, by a hundred-millionths of an inch per second for every second of spaceflight. Robert Lee…
May 15, 2008
The secret to winning in the NBA playoffs this year is to play on your own court: teams at home are 20-1. At first glance, this makes little sense. It's much easier to understand why football teams (the noise can disrupt play calling) and baseball teams (each field is unique) might benefit from…
May 15, 2008
D.T. Max has an absolutely fascinating article in a recent New Yorker on the molecular gastronomist and chef Grant Achatz and his battle with tongue cancer. While Achatz's doctors initially insisted that he get his tongue surgically removed, the chef opted for an experimental treatment of radiation…
May 14, 2008
One of the delicious ironies of memory is that, even when our recollections are utterly false, they still feel true. Consider this wonderful tale from the upcoming season of This American Life (I've loved the first two episodes, by the way):
Or as Proust put it: "How paradoxical it is to seek in…
May 14, 2008
I admire David Brooks for trying to expand the list of topics written about by Times columnists. (To be honest, I'm a little tired of reading about presidential politics.) His latest column, on "The Neural Buddhists," tries to interject modern neuroscience into the current debate over New Atheists…
May 12, 2008
The tragedies are so vast they are incomprehensible: thousands are dead after a powerful earthquake in China while up to half a million people in Myanmar may die as a result of post-cyclone epidemics. How does the mind grapple with such nightmarish statistics?
The answer is simple: it doesn't. Paul…
May 9, 2008
From the new Atlantic:
Four researchers compared the effectiveness of a cell phone equipped with a GPS receiver to traditional paper maps and to "direct experience" (first walking through a route with a guide, then trying it alone). They asked 66 participants to each walk six different routes,…
May 9, 2008
Sorry about the light posting - I've been traveling. As far as I'm concerned, the best thing about air-travel (besides the safety aspect) is that I get to read novels. For some reason, I've decided that I can't work or sleep on planes, so I always make sure that my carry-on bag is stuffed full of…
May 7, 2008
Over at Mind Matters, my other site, we just posted a rather interesting article on the ways in which ordinary cell phones can alter your patterns of brain activity, and even interfere with sleep. Here's Doug Fields:
Hospitals and airplanes ban the use of cell phones, because their electromagnetic…