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
March 13, 2008
One last note on the whole Spitzer affair. The reason I think it's dangerous to use the sexual habits of other species (or even other human cultures) as a baseline when discussing prostitution is that the evolutionary argument has very clear policy implications. If, as David Barash argued, sexual…
March 12, 2008
Evolutionary psychologist David Barash excuses the behavior of Eliot Spitzer on the grounds that monogamy is unnatural, an artificial construct of bourgeois civilization:
One of the most important insights of modern evolutionary biology has been an enhanced understanding of male-female…
March 12, 2008
Words of wisdom from Dario Checcini, the famous Tuscan butcher:
"The most important thing is what the animal eats and that it has a good life . . . just like us," Cecchini says. "My philosophy is that the cow has to have had a really good life with the least suffering possible," he says. "And every…
March 11, 2008
I've always been morbidly fascinated by examples of choking. It doesn't matter if it's Jean Van de Velde in the 1999 British Open, or Shaq at the free-throw line, there's something unbelievably poignant and nightmarish about watching a world-class performer get sabotaged by their own brain. I can't…
March 11, 2008
This whole Spitzer affair got me thinking about the psychology of power. When you look around the world, it's clear that so many of our problems are due, at least in part, to abuses of power. From Mugabe to Putin, Chavez to Cheney, there's obviously something deeply intoxicating and dangerous about…
March 10, 2008
This is crazy stuff:
A new study finds that moths can remember things they learned when they were caterpillars -- even though the process of metamorphosis essentially turns their brains and bodies to soup.
The implications of the PLOS study extend far beyond the world of moths and butterflies. For…
March 10, 2008
Cognitive Daily has a typically great review of some recent research connecting blood glucose levels and self-control:
Matthew Gailliot, along with Baumeister and six other researchers, asked 103 psychology students to fast for three hours before watching a video [the video required subjects to…
March 7, 2008
It's a new pilot program in a few dozen New York City schools: students are given cash rewards in exchange for higher test scores. Jennifer Medina reports:
The fourth graders squirmed in their seats, waiting for their prizes. In a few minutes, they would learn how much money they had earned for…
March 6, 2008
The NY Times group blog on Migraines just posted a really fantastic article by Jeff Tweedy, leader of Wilco (one of my favorite bands), on his chronic migraine condition:
There are a lot of different ways migraines have affected my music, and vice versa: being a musician has allowed me -- for lack…
March 6, 2008
Radio Lab delves into the mystery:
Yang and her colleagues put all 49 people, both the liars and the non-liars, into a magnetic resonant imaging scanner and took pictures of their prefrontal cortex. They chose to focus on this area of the brain because previous studies had shown that the prefrontal…
March 5, 2008
One of the most frequent questions I get when speaking about my book is the MSG question. My talk is about L-glutamate, the taste of umami and veal stock (it makes a little more sense if you've read the book) and, before I get to the punchline, I'm inevitably interrupted by someone insisting that…
March 5, 2008
My article on the Blue Brain project is now online*:
It took less than two years for the Blue Brain supercomputer to accurately simulate a neocortical column, which is a tiny slice of brain containing approximately 10,000 neurons, with about 30 million synaptic connections between them. "The column…
March 4, 2008
I know I just wrote an article on the power of expectations, but this is ridiculous:
In a series of studies in the 1970s and '80s, psychologists at the University of Washington put more than 300 students into a study room outfitted like a bar with mirrors, music and a stretch of polished pine. The…
March 3, 2008
The Times has an interesting profile of Johan Santana, perhaps the most effective pitcher in baseball. What's interesting about Santana is that his secret isn't a 98 mph fastball or some wicked new breaking ball. Rather, he strikes out batters because he denies batters the perceptual cues they rely…
February 29, 2008
Jim Holt has a great article on the strange neural anatomy of mathematics in the new New Yorker:
One morning in September, 1989, a forme sales representative in his mid-fortie entered an examination room with Stanisla Dehaene, a young neuroscientist based in Paris Three years earlier, the man,…
February 28, 2008
Noam Scheiber has an article in TNR touting Obama's connections to behavioral economics. The article isn't particularly persuasive, since the only examples Scheiber can muster are Obama's 401(k) savings plan and his embrace of automatic tax returns. Neither plan is unique to Obama, and only the…
February 28, 2008
A cool new PNAS paper from the Koch lab:
In their experiment, the researchers presented six volunteers with four types of ambiguous stimuli. The volunteers viewed or listened to the stimuli and pressed a key on a keyboard when a perceptual shift occurred. At the same time, infrared eye-tracking…
February 28, 2008
Ronald Bailey looks at the data and concludes that having children doesn't make us happy:
"Economists have modeled the impact of many variables on people's overall happiness and have consistently found that children have only a small impact. A small negative impact," reports Harvard psychologist…
February 27, 2008
Lots of attention has been paid to the latest review/meta-analysis demonstrating that popular antidepressant medications don't seem to be that much more effective than placebos. While this certainly isn't the first time someone has demonstrated that Prozac is only mildly more useful than a sugar…
February 26, 2008
Molly Young has a really interesting article on the rampant abuse of Adderall in elite universities in n+1. Essentially, Adderall is a composite of several different amphetamines, which are digested by the brain at different rates. So many kids are prescribed Adderall nowadays that virtually every…
February 26, 2008
I had an article in the Sunday Boston Globe Ideas section on the way our expectations of reality often trump reality itself:
Expectations have long been a topic of psychological research, and it's well known that they affect how we react to events, or how we respond to medication. But in recent…
February 22, 2008
Loyal readers know that I'm a big fan of Jason Kottke. His blog, aptly summarized as "liberal arts 2.0," is a consistent source of the best and smartest links from around the web. So I was really flattered to get interviewed on the site:
Kottke: Are there other books/media out there that share a…
February 22, 2008
Michael Specter has written a really fine article on the ambiguities and complexities involved in the measurement of carbon emissions. Sounds dull, right? It's actually full of fascinating facts:
Just two countries--Indonesia and Brazil--account for about ten per cent of the greenhouse gases…
February 22, 2008
In my recent Seed article on science and art, I wrote about how we need to foster a new cultural movement:
If we are serious about unifying human knowledge, then we'll need to create a new movement that coexists with the third culture but that deliberately trespasses on our cultural boundaries and…
February 21, 2008
First, a warning: the video below is very disturbing. It's footage of cows being prepared for slaughter at Hallmark Meat Processing. This video, which was surreptitiously shot by the Humane Society, led to the largest ever recall of beef - 134 million pounds - although most of the recalled meat has…
February 21, 2008
A fascinating, if macabre, interview with a man who intentionally cut off his hand:
BME: We've touched on it, but I guess now the big question -- "why"?
I'm one of those body-integrity-disorder (BIID) dudes. As long as I can remember, having two hands was a defect in my body -- something that was…
February 20, 2008
Michel Foucault wouldn't be surprised to learn that yes, even comedy is defined by power-relations. Here's Ellen Horne of Radio Lab:
Tyler Stillman, a psychologist at Florida State University, did a series of studies showing that laughter isn't always about how funny something is. He found that…
February 20, 2008
Have you heard about InnoCentive? It's my new favorite website. The premise of the site is simple: "seekers" post their scientific problems and "solvers" try to solve them. If the problem is successfully solved, then the "solver" gets a specified monetary reward. (The money is the incentive part of…
February 19, 2008
Exciting news! I'm the new curator of the Scientific American expert blog seminar Mind Matters. (Thanks, David!) For those of you who are unfamiliar with the site, it features commentary by real scientists on recent scientific papers. This week's blog is by Mauricio Delgado, a neuroscientist at…
February 18, 2008
First, read this:
Prince Rupert's Drops are a glass curiosity created by dripping hot molten glass into cold water. The glass cools into a tadpole-shaped droplet with a long, thin, tail. The water rapidly cools the molten glass on the outside of the drop, while the inner portion of the drop remains…