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
April 14, 2008
Raymond Tallis recently launched a broadside against the nascent field of neuroaesthetics, especially as applied to literature:
A generation of academic literary critics has now arisen who invoke "neuroscience" to assist them in their work of explication, interpretation and appreciation. Norman…
April 14, 2008
When I mutter about the fourth culture, about the possibility of bridging the cultural chasms separating art and science, I should make it clear that I'm not talking about stuff like this. In fact, I think there's something mildly offensive about turning one of the more profound equations of modern…
April 11, 2008
A recent scene at the Bronx Zoo gorilla exhibit:
On the left side of the enclosure, standing five feet away from the glass wall separating man and animal, is a big male gorilla. He crosses his arms as he gazes out at his adoring audience. The humans are thrilled - "He has such sensitive eyes!' is a…
April 9, 2008
A great comment by Joel Kahn, who argues that we need a new science of human interaction, able to study what Durkheim referred to as "the conscience collective":
Durkheim was obviously not the first to advance a notion of mind which transcended the individual. But while it may have been common for…
April 7, 2008
For those who might be interested (hi mom!): I'll be on the Leonard Lopate show on WNYC show early this afternoon, around 1 pm. I'll be talking about veal stock, glutamic acid and umami, so I suggest that you eat lunch before listening, or else the subject will make you even hungrier.
April 7, 2008
Here's Junot Diaz, talking about his writing process:
It was an incredibly difficult struggle. I tell a lot of young people I work with that nothing should be more inspirational than my dumb ass. It took me 11 years to struggle through one dumb book, and every day you just want to give up. But you…
April 6, 2008
It seems that you can't go to a chic restaurant nowadays without encountering octopus on the menu. Like its cephalopod cousins, octotpus is best cooked according to the "two-minute or two-hour" rule. You can either grill the octopus quickly, imbuing it with a meaty smoke flavor, or you can braise…
April 4, 2008
Sorry for the light posting - I've been flitting about, spending way too much time in airports. (My carbon footprint is a constant source of guilt.) I've recently spent a lot of time hanging around various universities, which always reminds me of just how good undergraduates have it. They manage to…
April 2, 2008
I've been remiss in not linking to Benjamin Cohen's incredibly interesting series of posts on scientific objectivity.
The mere fact that objectivity *has* a history is revealing. It's more typical that the timeless, ahuman connotation of "objectivity" renders it the precise sort of thing that does…
April 2, 2008
There's no shortage of books on neurological patients with brain injuries, but Head Cases, the new book by Michael Paul Mason, is one of my recent favorites. (See here for the Times review.) Mason brings a unique perspective to the tragic tales, as he's not a neurologist or a neuroscientist.…
March 31, 2008
The Economist has compiled a really interesting chart on the ideological differences between the American and British electorates. (I've been kind of obsessed with all things Anglo-American since the start of the John Adams miniseries on HBO.) The article focuses on the large gap between the two…
March 31, 2008
This is from The Paris Review Interviews, Volume 1:
Q: I would like to ask about your having said that you were very timid about beginning to write stories.
Borges: Yes, I was very timid because when I was young I thought of myself as a poet. Then I had an accident. You can feel the scar. If you…
March 31, 2008
Someone should really tell the NCAA tournament television commentators that "the hot hand" doesn't exist. I've gotten pretty tired of hearing these tired cliches about Texas going cold, or Stephen Curry catching fire yet again. Never has a cognitive illusion gotten so much play.
The illusory…
March 27, 2008
If you happen to be in the Charlottesville area, I'll be at the Virginia Book Festival tomorrow afternoon, on a panel entitled: "The Creative Mind: How Artists and Writers Invent the World."
March 26, 2008
A commenter asked an astute question in response to my post on religion and dietary laws:
What are your thoughts on kashrut primarily as a means of group indentity reinforcement, ritual, and control? In pre-literate times or in unstable social settings, wouldn't dietary habits be a useful means of…
March 26, 2008
I was raised in a kosher household, which meant that I grew up convinced that bacon, lobster, pepperoni pizza and cheeseburgers were the promised land of food. (I assumed the banning of trafe was part of God's punishment for Eve and the apple.) I'm no longer kosher, which means that I've since…
March 25, 2008
I had no idea this many Americans were nocturnal:
Twenty percent of American workers are night-shift workers, and the number is growing by about 3% per year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. While the rest of society sleeps, police officers, security guards, truck drivers, office…
March 24, 2008
If you're into art, science and the brain, or enjoyed the recent MoMA show on design, then be sure to check out this Seed/MoMA/Parsons event on April 4th. The guest list is pretty fantastic, and includes everyone from Benoit Mandelbrot to Henry Markram to Chandler Burr to Erik Demaine to Greg Lynn…
March 24, 2008
My bracket is a disaster: I seem to have an uncanny talent for picking all the wrong upsets. But perhaps I should find solace in the fact that the NCAA tournament is inherently unpredictable. That, at least, was the conclusion of a 2001 paper by the economists Edward Kaplan and Stanley Garstka.…
March 21, 2008
Over at Mixing Memory, there's an excellent and fierce critique of a recent fMRI paper on linguistic relativity. Although the post is shot through with overly broad insults - he or she complains about "how much cognitive neuroscience sucks" - it still manages to carefully dissect the data. In short…
March 20, 2008
Over at Mind Matters, the expert blog I curate at Scientific American, we've had some really good posts lately. The most recent post, by Maryanne Wolf (author of that other Proust book on neuroscience, Proust and the Squid), Mirit Barzillai and Elizabeth Norton, looks at the reading brain. They…
March 19, 2008
First, watch this:
Then read the poem it inspired, which was written by one of my favorite poets, Wislawa Szymborska:
The Experiment
As a short subject before the main feature -
in which the actors did their best
to make me cry and even laugh -
we were shown an interesting experiment
involving a…
March 19, 2008
I guess I should make it clear that, contrary to the title of my talk, Kanye West isn't really a neuroscientist. (Conveying irony via the internet isn't easy. Although it's still amusing to imagine him, in full rapper regalia, doing minipreps and PCR's.) So what does Kanye have to do with the…
March 19, 2008
Flying back from Little Rock, I had the pleasure of sitting next to a 68 year old man who had never flown on a plane before. For most of us, traveling through the air at 400 mph on a steel bird has become such a routine, banal, tiresome, frustrating experience that it's nice to be reminded of the…
March 18, 2008
Kennedy Fraser had an illuminating profile of the novelist Pat Barker in a recent New Yorker (not online):
Barker grew up with silent, wounded men. "And with talkative women, spinning stories," she said. "Stories with bits missing." She is a true war baby. "My mother was in the Wrems" - the Women's…
March 17, 2008
If I've got any readers in the Little Rock area, you might be interested in a little talk I'm giving tomorrow evening at the Clinton School of Public Service. The title of the talk is "Kanye West Was A Neuroscientist," which has poor Marcel rolling over in his grave.
March 17, 2008
This is very depressing:
The Chinook salmon that swim upstream to spawn in the fall, the most robust run in the Sacramento River, have disappeared. The almost complete collapse of the richest and most dependable source of Chinook salmon south of Alaska left gloomy fisheries experts struggling for…
March 17, 2008
A few weeks ago, John Lanchester wrote a thoughtful meditation on the intertwined nature of perception, smell and taste:
A taste or a smell can pass you by, unremarked or nearly so, in large part because you don't have a word for it; then you see the thing and grasp the meaning of a word at the…
March 14, 2008
It's long been recognized that American kids suck at math, at least when compared to kids in Singapore, Finland, etc. What's less well known is that the steep decline in proficiency only starts when kids are taught algebra. That, at least, is the conclusion of a new government report:
"The sharp…
March 13, 2008
Via bookslut comes a heartbreaking excerpt from Roger Deakin's Wildwood: A Journey Through Trees:
[Konrad] Lorenz observed that jackdaws form lifelong attachments, as rooks seem to do, and that there is a distinct, well-understood pecking order within the tribe to which all the members adhere…