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
May 6, 2008
British papers are fun. The Daily Mail recently ran a deliciously nasty article on hippy-crites, those pious celebrities (like John Travolta, Chris Martin and Brangelina) who talk endlessly about global warming and yet still fly in lots of private jets. Travolta, for instance, recently few by…
May 6, 2008
In recent years, there has been lots of speculation on the potential intersection of neuroscience and the legal system. Will brain imaging became a fool-proof lie detector? Are some violent offenders suffering from a defective emotional brain that's beyond their control? Should we replace the…
May 5, 2008
The Times recently had an article on the booming business of brain fitness:
Decaying brains, or the fear thereof, have inspired a mini-industry of brain health products -- not just supplements like coenzyme Q10, ginseng and bacopa, but computer-based fitter-brain products as well.
Nintendo's $19.99…
May 5, 2008
It is, perhaps, the most nightmarish of neurological conditions: when the brain stem is selectively injured, a person can be perfectly self-aware and yet completely paralyzed, so that they lose control of virtually all voluntary muscles. The technical name of the syndrome captures the horror: "…
May 4, 2008
I completely agree with the sentiments voiced in this column, by William Rhoden:
Why do we keep giving thoroughbred horse racing a pass? Is it the tradition? The millions upon millions invested in the betting?
Why isn't there more pressure to put the sport of kings under the umbrella of animal…
May 2, 2008
Razib has some thought-provoking, if incorrect, speculations on literature, literary audiences and modernity:
Here's the argument: contemporary mainstream fiction is very different from the storytelling of the deep past because of a demand side shift. Women consume most fiction today, and their…
May 1, 2008
Now that the boomers are entering their sixties, the problem of age-related cognitive decline is going to become a serious mental health issue. The aged brain often suffers from a bevy of symptoms, from memory loss to problems with concentration. The question, of course, is what causes these…
April 30, 2008
So there's an acute fertilizer shortage. The big problem is a lack of nitrogen which, although it accounts for most of the atmosphere (78.1 percent), is notoriously tough to "fix," since it's got those pesky triple bonds. One of the unsung heroes of modernity is the Haber process, which makes…
April 30, 2008
A calm and cool summary of the value of arts education in public schools:
What are "the habits of mind" cultivated in arts classrooms, they ask in their book "Studio Thinking: The Real Benefits of Visual Arts Education." As unsatisfied with wafty promises that arts learning inspires "creativity" as…
April 29, 2008
First, the Hotel St. George Press, a really cool literary publishing group in Brooklyn (where else?) was kind enough to ask me a few questions:
Heather McCalden: Would you mind relaying a bit about your experiences in the lab, the kitchen, and the writer's desk - how they may have fed each other,…
April 29, 2008
The Times has an interesting review of two new books that discuss the oft cited link between mental illness and artistic creativity. It's all too easy to indulge in cliched overgeneralizations about the thin line separating madness and genius, but the reality is that true mental illness is rarely…
April 28, 2008
You probably thought this post was going to be about how Meredith Grey (or perhaps McDreamy?) is a neuroscientist, or how Shonda Rhimes (the creator of Grey's Anatomy) anticipated some surprising discovery of modern neuroscience. Alas, I have no such insights. Marcel Proust may have been a…
April 28, 2008
War Emblem, the 2002 Kentucky Derby winner, is one finicky horse:
By all accounts, he [War Emblem] is a happy horse -- gamboling through fields most of the day, showing the turn of foot that propelled him to lead every step of the way in America's greatest horse race.
In reality, however, War…
April 25, 2008
I'm no forager. Once, I took a foraging class in Brooklyn's Prospect Park and managed to find varieties of poisonous mushrooms that even the instructor had never encountered before. (They looked like porcini mushrooms to me.) Nevertheless, I've gotten very excited this year about the wild chives…
April 25, 2008
Razib calls my attention to this new Nature study on the genetic variation underlying the stress response. The researchers focused on neuropeptide Y, an endogenous anxiolytic (it's like an anti-anxiety drug naturally produced by the brain) which is released in response to stress. They focused on a…
April 24, 2008
It sounds like one of those 1950's psychological experiments that scientific ethics boards no longer allow: Nicholas White was trapped in an elevator in New York City's McGraw-Hill building for forty-one hours. Just thinking about such an ordeal gives me shivers of claustrophobic anxiety. Forty-one…
April 24, 2008
Go see his new show at MoMA. Here's Peter Schjeldahl:
Eliasson is entertaining, yet his central concern seems less a working of spectacular magic than an investigation of how spectacular magic works. He raises awareness of the neurological susceptibilities that condition all of what we see and may…
April 24, 2008
Rebecca Solnit, author of some wonderful books, astutely describes one of the worst side-effects of testosterone:
We were preparing to leave [a party in Aspen] when our host said, "No, stay a little longer so I can talk to you." He was an imposing man who'd made a lot of money in advertising or…
April 23, 2008
Did you know that more than 53 percent of the prisoners in Federal prisons are serving time for drug offenses? That's crazy. When will our politicians realize that drug addiction is a mental illness, and that the War on Drugs is essentially a futile struggle against the dopamine reward pathway?…
April 23, 2008
Over at the wonderful World's Fair, Ben Cohen has an interview with Kelly Joyce, author of the forthcoming Magnetic Appeal: MRI and the Myth of Transparency. Here is how Joyce summarizes the main argument of her book:
In the United States, MRI is socially constructed as a sacred technology--one…
April 22, 2008
Crazy stuff, courtesy of John Tierney:
The natural impulse to stop holding your breath (typically within 30 seconds or a minute) is not because of an oxygen shortage but because of the painful buildup of carbon dioxide. Mr. Blaine said he began trying to overcome that urge when he was a child in…
April 22, 2008
Is this chart surprising?
I was an Arts (English) and Psychology (Neuroscience) major, so I clearly didn't choose the most lucrative fields. (And I contemplated a philosophy minor...) For me, the most surprising aspect of the chart (and it's still not that surprising) was the payoff of…
April 21, 2008
Speaking of the senses, it's always fascinating what happens when that sensory spigot is turned off, so that the cortex is suddenly filled with silence. Jad Abumrad, the co-host of Radio Lab (download their new season!), recently spent some time in an anechoic chamber, or a room designed to stifle…
April 21, 2008
In honor of National Poetry Month, which always struck me as a very bizarre month (is poetry less essential in the other eleven months of the year? And why April?), I thought I'd post a selection of some poetry on brainy themes. Here, for instance, is the opening stanza of Franz Wright poem in the…
April 20, 2008
I've got a cockatiel with an inverted beak - it's a pretty funny looking underbite, but doesn't interfere with his eating - and I've often wondered if animals ever get self-conscious about their appearance. Does my cockatiel have any clue that he looks a little ridiculous? Does the chinese crested…
April 17, 2008
Nicholas Kristof has an excellent column on rationalizing, partisan affiliation and the Clinton/Obama race:
If you're a Democrat, your candidate won in Wednesday night's presidential debate -- that was obvious, and most neutral observers would recognize that. But the other candidate issued…
April 17, 2008
One of the odd things about blogs, at least for me, is that they encourage a really informal and oddly intimate relationship between the writer and reader. I feel like I really know my favorite bloggers, in a way that I would never presume to know my favorite novelists or newspaper columnists or…
April 16, 2008
For more than 30 years, it has been a truism of social science that, once our basic needs are met, money doesn't buy happiness, or even upgrade despair. In one well-known survey, people on the Forbes 100 list of the richest Americans were only slightly happier than the American public as a whole;…
April 15, 2008
It's a joke I've heard many times from neuroscientists who use monkeys in their research: "There are all these regulations about the treatment of primates, but there are no regulations governing the treatment of post-docs". (Of course, we don't record from neurons in the post-doc brain, or at least…
April 15, 2008
Over at Freakonomics, they invited several prominent thinkers to weigh in on a rather lofty question: How much progress have psychology and psychiatry really made?
The answers are mostly interesting, with nearly everyone agreeing that the sciences of the mind and brain have made tremendous…