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.
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Posts by this author
January 17, 2008
I'm definitely ready for the writer's strike to be over. I actually watched two hours of American Idol last night. I haven't watched many of these pre-competition shows before, when Paula, Randy and Simon sit through the auditions of strangers off the street, but I couldn't help but notice that the…
January 16, 2008
My recent article in Seed is now online. Here is the nut graf:
The current constraints of science make it clear that the breach between our two cultures is not merely an academic problem that stifles conversation at cocktail parties. Rather, it is a practical problem, and it holds back science's…
January 16, 2008
I was talking to a neuroscientist the other day and he started complaining about fMRI studies. They are too easy, unreliable, etc. (This is a surprisingly common complaint among neuroscientists who rely on the techniques of molecular biology.) But then he asked me a question that I couldn't answer…
January 16, 2008
I've got a big man-crush on Jamie Oliver. And I really appreciate his latest stunt:
Last Friday, in front of 4 million television viewers and a studio audience, the chef Jamie Oliver killed a chicken. Having recently obtained a United Kingdom slaughterman's license, Mr. Oliver staged a "gala dinner…
January 15, 2008
So I'm reading about the latest cosmological absurdity and feeling pretty smug. It turns out that, according to the equations, your existence is simply "some momentary fluctuation in a field of matter and energy out in space...Your memories and the world you think you see around you are illusions…
January 15, 2008
I've written about our wine biases before, but now we have anatomical evidence of why, exactly, expensive wine seems to taste better.
The experiment, led by researchers at Cal-Tech and Stanford, was simple. [A free version of the study is here.] Twenty subjects tasted five wine samples which were…
January 14, 2008
After posting on some new research that suggests we are more sexually fluid than we typically assume - in other words, our strict sexual categories are largely cultural - I got a fascinating email from a reader:
I thought you may find my own experience, having lived in both eastern and western…
January 14, 2008
It took a few centuries, but it looks as though psychology and neuroscience are finally moving beyond the dualisms of Descartes. Here is the always interesting Boston Globe Ideas section:
The brain is often envisioned as something like a computer, and the body as its all-purpose tool. But a growing…
January 10, 2008
How universal are our first impressions of people? Test yourself against this piece of video art:
Do you agree with most of the descriptions? The art is surprisingly riveting, no?
Via kottke
January 10, 2008
There's an interview with me in Newsweek.com:
NEWSWEEK: What surprised you most while doing the research for this book?
Jonah Lehrer: One thing was how seriously all of these artists took their art. They really believed that their novels and paintings and poetry were expressing deep truths about…
January 10, 2008
One of the many reasons I'm a big fan of Michael Pollan's work, including his latest manifesto, is that he's one of the few science journalists who emphasizes what science doesn't know. Here's an interview from Gourmet:
CH: When your piece first came out in the Times Magazine urging people to…
January 9, 2008
From a very interesting interview with Anthony Bourdain:
AVC: Do you ever feel like your sense of taste or smell was diminished by your drug use?
Bourdain: Who knows? I think, technically, male palates start to decline very early anyway, around 27 or 28. That's what God made salt for.
On a related…
January 9, 2008
Needless to say, the political pundits were hilariously wrong about the New Hampshire primary. I won't hypothesize about what actually happened, other than to say that I think many voters here wanted a longer primary. They didn't want an Obama coronation in the beginning of January. This says less…
January 8, 2008
I agree with Jeffrey Goldberg: the first episode of The Wire's final season was disappointing.
I was enjoying myself just fine for the first 20 minutes or so, becoming reacquainted with some of my favorite drug dealers--the intensely lovable psycho-killer Snoop most of all--and scandalous cops.…
January 8, 2008
The Times has an interesting interview with Scott Page, a professor of complex systems, political science and economics at the University of Michigan:
Q. In your book you posit that organizations made up of different types of people are more productive than homogenous ones. Why do you say that?
A.…
January 7, 2008
A lovely appreciation:
I received the news in an email almost exactly a year ago. As so often in recent years, Rorty voiced his resignation at the "war president" Bush, whose policies deeply aggrieved him, the patriot who had always sought to "achieve" his country. After three or four paragraphs of…
January 7, 2008
Sometimes, I feel like the only journalist/blogger in New Hampshire who isn't writing about politics. My street is littered with campaign signs, from Kucinich to Huckabee, that have been stuck haphazardly into the snow. My recycling bin is full of glossy campaign mailers. In the last 48 hours,…
January 4, 2008
Daniel Davies has compiled a smart list of arguments that he is no longer going to have. He explains:
While not necessarily claiming to have the definitive truth on these subjects, my views are no longer up for argument, pending absolutely spectacular new evidence. I've had a number of arguments on…
January 4, 2008
A new book, Shock Therapy, has recently been published, which offers a contrarian take on the history of electroconvulsive therapy, or ECT. I haven't read the book, but Barron Lerner reviews it in Slate:
The authors believe that electroconvulsive therapy is incredibly effective. And yet for decades…
January 3, 2008
Phantom limb syndrome has always been intertwined with war. It was first discovered by Silas Weir Mitchell after the Battle of Gettysburg, when the hospitals of Philadelphia were overwhelmed by soldiers with amputated limbs. Many of these soldiers said that they still felt their missing arms and…
January 3, 2008
One of my resolutions for the new year was spending less time googling myself. (Such are the vanities of an insecure writer.) So far, I'm off to a bad start. I apologize for the self-promotion, but there have recently been some very nice reviews of the book that I thought I'd share. Here's an…
January 2, 2008
Lisa Diamond, a psychologist at the University of Utah, deserves credit for bringing a controversial idea to the academic surface. Here's the Boston Globe Ideas section:
In this country, we tell a certain story about homosexuality: We believe that people who come out as gay almost always stick with…
January 2, 2008
If, like me, you're sorely missing new episodes of The Office, then I've got the novel for you. It's Joshua Ferris' fantastic debut novel, and it's a sad/funny tour of office life. (Keep in mind that I've never worked in an office, so I have no idea how authentic the novel really is. But it feels…
December 31, 2007
Just wanted to thank everyone for making this blog such a consistent source of pleasure for me. I don't deserve such a smart audience, but I'm endlessly grateful for it. And thanks for putting up with all the shameless self-horn tooting over the past few months. I hope everyone out there has a…
December 31, 2007
One of the unfortunate consequences of Iowa and New Hampshire getting so much snow this December is that it has really muted the discussion of global warming. I've now been to enough campaign events to realize that the weather definitely affects political discourse. On a hot summer day, just about…
December 31, 2007
Here in central New Hampshire, we got another 10-12 inches of snow last night. It's been a winter of heavy precipitation, with sleet giving way to wet snow which turns into powder which eventually freezes into rock solid ice. This post was originally going to be about how I now understand why the…
December 28, 2007
I'm certainly no music critic, but since it's the season of top 10 lists, I thought I'd share my favorite songs of the year, even if my list is bound to typecast me as yet another overeducated twentysomething with a soft spot for indy music, American Apparel and thick-rimmed glasses. The list is in…
December 27, 2007
So I'm browsing the juice section at my local supermarket, trying to figure out if I like pulpy bits in my orange juice, when I notice that Minute Maid has a new line of "enhanced juices". I couldn't help but laugh at the tag line for the Pomegranate Blueberry drink: "Help Nourish Your Brain!" The…
December 27, 2007
Terry McDermott, who penned that great series on neuroscientist Gary Lynch earlier this year, has written another illuminating article on Alzheimer's. The news is bleak: scientists have yet to understand the disease. In fact, we still don't even know what causes the cellular degeneration in the…
December 26, 2007
Is altruism really innate?
PS. Martin's new memoir is really great.