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
February 18, 2008
There's a nice overview of recent work on animal cognition in the latest National Geographic.
Certain skills are considered key signs of higher mental abilities: good memory, a grasp of grammar and symbols, self-awareness, understanding others' motives, imitating others, and being creative. Bit by…
February 15, 2008
There are so many reasons to despair about human diversity. There's Iraq, Kenya, the immigration debate, the research of Robert Putnam. It seems that, in tragic example after tragic example, humans react to diversity by splintering into tribalisms, regressing to an Us vs. Them mentality.
So that's…
February 14, 2008
To call "Radio Lab" a science radio show is like calling "This American Life" a radio show about, well, what the hell is "This American Life" about? (Quirky themes? Good stories? Bourgeois dilemmas?) The point is that the best radio shows defy easy categorization. And Radio Lab is definitely one of…
February 13, 2008
Woody Allen was a prescient man. Dr. Stuart Meloy has created a device that seems to help women with sexual problems regain their ability to have an orgasm:
The experimental implant -- now trademarked by Meloy as the Orgasmatron after the orgasm-inducing cylinder in Woody Allen's 1973 movie "…
February 13, 2008
The Times Magazine had an interesting article on whether or not "preterm infants" can experience pain. "Experience" is the key word in that sentence:
In a series of clinical trials, he [Kanwaljeet Anand] demonstrated that operations performed under minimal or no anesthesia produced a "massive…
February 12, 2008
It's so easy to take our cultural forms for granted. We get so used to their particulars that we forget there is nothing inviolate about them. Movies can have sad endings, classical music can turn atonal and novelists can get self-referential. Such transgressions are the mark of cultural progress…
February 12, 2008
Remember a few years ago, when there were all these books that tried to explain the history of everything in terms of some seemingly minor subject, like "Cod" or "Salt"? I think it's time to apply this publishing trope to neuroscience: we need a book on dopamine. That damn neurotransmitter is…
February 11, 2008
There was something particularly infuriating about Mitt Romney's concession speech. He's clearly a smart guy - once upon a time, he was a socially moderate, pragmatic Republican - and yet the address was filled with utter nonsense like this:
Europe is facing a demographic disaster. That's the…
February 10, 2008
I recently had the pleasure of getting interviewed by Natasha Mitchell, host of All in the Mind. To be honest, I can't bear to listen to the interview - the sound of my own voice grates against my ears, like fingernails on a chalkboard.*
I know others have a similar aversion. But why is that? I…
February 7, 2008
Here's a good test of your critical acumen. This site has a quiz comparing the priceless designs of Donald Judd against cheap furniture from Ikea and Wal-Mart. It's often surprisingly hard to tell the two apart, although I take this less as an indictment of Judd (who I've always admired) and more…
February 7, 2008
We spend so much time fixating on our genetic differences that we tend to overlook the places where the human genome has converged over time.
In a study published yesterday in Nature Genetics, geneticists from France's Pasteur Institute compared DNA variations in people from Japan, China, Nigeria…
February 6, 2008
Deprive the mind of sensory stimuli, and what does the mind do? It starts to hallucinate. It invents perceptions amid the emptiness, filling in the void with make-believe. This is known as Charles Bonnet syndrome, and it affects approximately 10 percent of who go blind:
It took almost 50 years, but…
February 5, 2008
That is, if your window happens to be a cockpit over Maui. I thank the reader who sent this photo in. Not only does the tropical sunset brighten another gloomy New England day, but it reminds us that even wind farms can be beautiful:
February 5, 2008
I'm morbidly fascinated by the massive losses recently incurred by the French Bank Societe Generale. My fascination is partly rooted in the sheer scale of the disaster, a scale that's essentially incomprehensible. (I have no idea what a $7,000,000,000 loss really means.)
But I'm also interested…
February 4, 2008
I'm really looking forward to reading Anne Harrington's new book on the history of mind-body medicine. I thought this factoid, from her interview with the Boston Globe Ideas section, was quite interesting:
IDEAS: One of the things I learned reading the book is that there's no word for "hot flashes…
February 4, 2008
This video is shamefully manipulative. It's just a bunch of celebrities, from Scarlett to John Legend, harmonizing over a particularly eloquent Obama speech. The rhetoric is beautiful, poetic and vapid. The camera work is a little too artful. The crescendo at the end is a little too obvious.
And…
February 4, 2008
Apparently, if you breathe in vaporized bits of swine cortex you have a decent chance of getting very sick. That, at least, is the tenuous conclusion of a doctors in Minnesota:
The ailment is characterized by sensations of burning, numbness and weakness in the arms and legs. For most, this is…
February 2, 2008
This is from Paul Bloom's review of Kwame Anthony Appiah's new book on the uses and abuses of experimental philosophy:
Near the end of the book, Appiah says that when he tells a stranger on a plane that he is a philosopher, he often gets the question, "So, what's your philosophy?" He answers, "My…
February 1, 2008
This prank reminds me of that Stanley Milgram experiment where people stopped on busy New York City sidewalks and looked up. When only one person was stopped, about 4 percent of pedestrians joined the man and looked at whatever he was looking at. But as Milgram increased the crowd size, more and…
January 31, 2008
Baudelaire famously described his memory as "a tomb, a corpse filled Potter's field/a pyramid where the dead lie down by scores/I am a graveyard that the moon abhors." Well, the neural reality of the brain suggests that his poetic metaphors weren't such exaggerations. That, at least, is the…
January 31, 2008
One of the questions I get asked most often when discussing my book is what artists working today are creating work that's relevant to the discourse of science. My stock answer is to mutter something inarticulate about Richard Powers. But now I've got someone new to talk about: Olafur Eliasson.…
January 31, 2008
I just got back from a week long trip to California. (You can hear me talking about Proust on KQED here.) The weather was awful - rain and more rain - but I still got glimpses of what I love so much about the Golden State. Consider the Hollywood Farmer's Market. It's a weekly gathering of a few…
January 30, 2008
I've got a new article on the psychology of back pain in the February issue of Best Life (the one with Jeff Gordon on the cover):
I've put the entire article below the fold:
Dr. Marc Sopher, a family physician in Exeter, New Hampshire, is drenched in sweat. He's just run eight miles on a humid…
January 24, 2008
Are too many neuroscientists are trying to popularize the state of their science? Jason Zevin thinks so:
At best, most of what is known is more complicated than I'm able to understand--much less explain to a general audience. And at least some of what I know about any topic in neuroscience is…
January 24, 2008
I'm sorry about the lack of posts: I've been traveling. (I'm currently in the surprisingly chilly and wet Los Angeles area.) Given the turbulence on Wall Street recently, I thought I'd repost something I wrote last year on the neuroscience of regret and financial decisions. The experiment,…
January 22, 2008
Interesting stuff:
The research team led by Tania Singer, at UCL, asked volunteers to play a game with employees of the lab, secretly instructing the employees to play either fairly or unfairly. Afterward, the scientists measured brain activity in the same volunteers under quite different…
January 21, 2008
Last week, David Brooks had a smart column on the essential "irrationality" of voters. (I'm defining irrationality here as any mental process that's not rational/deliberate/System 2. I have no idea if our democracy would be better off if voters imitated the rational agents in economics textbooks. I…
January 21, 2008
I had an op-ed in the LA Times on Sunday. It's about reductionism and the brain:
The reductionist method, although undeniably successful, has very real limitations. Not everything benefits from being broken down into tiny pieces. Look, for example, at a Beethoven symphony. If the music is reduced…
January 18, 2008
That, at least, is the consensus of a new paper in Neuropharmacology:
There is a general consensus that the effects of cannabinoid agonists on anxiety seem to be biphasic, with low doses being anxiolytic and high doses ineffective or possibly anxiogenic. Besides the behavioural effects of…
January 17, 2008
Economists parse the stats and find the correlation:
We find that college football games are associated with sharp increases in crime. For instance, assaults increase by about 9% when a community hosts a college football game, vandalism increases by about 18%, and DUIs increase by about 13%. We…