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
December 26, 2007
I hope everyone had a lovely and merry Christmas. I've got a post-Christmas question: What cognitive skills are required for present-wrapping? Spatial logic? An intuitive sense of geometry? A belief in neatness? All of the above? I only ask because I am clearly missing whatever skills are required.
December 23, 2007
I've got a review of Pinker's latest in The Washington Post:
Language comes so naturally to us that it's easy to believe there's some sort of intrinsic logic connecting the thing and its name, the signifier and the signified. In one of Plato's dialogues, a character named Cratylus argues that "a…
December 20, 2007
I always assumed that the best race horses simply had the best genes. It seemed like the kind of domain where nature trumped nurture, where the genetics of fast twitch fibers and heart size was more important than the details of training. But my assumptions were exactly backwards:
The offspring of…
December 20, 2007
Since it's supposed to be the season of charity, that time of year when we remember those who are less fortunate than we are, I thought I'd post on altruism and the brain, since there have recently been a few interesting studies. The basic moral of these experiments is that we are built to be…
December 19, 2007
Malcolm Gladwell endorses the use of Human Growth Hormone for athletes, at least when it's used to recover from injury:
What, exactly, is wrong with an athlete--someone who makes a living with their body--taking medication to speed their recovery from injury? Is it wrong to take ibruprofen? Is it…
December 19, 2007
Ben Wallace-Wells, in Rolling Stone, recently wrote a fantastic and tragic article on America's War on Drugs:
All told, the United States has spent an estimated $500 billion to fight drugs - with very little to show for it. Cocaine is now as cheap as it was when Escobar died and more heavily used.…
December 18, 2007
Are teenagers too rational? That, at least, is the conclusion of a recent study showing that teens overestimate the riskiness of things like unprotected sex and drunk driving, yet choose to do them anyways:
A study by researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, found that teenagers…
December 17, 2007
For a wonderful example of Oliver Sacks' "romantic scientific method" at work - a method he borrowed, at least in part, from the great Russian neurologist A.R. Luria - listen to this NPR piece, by Robert Krulwich.
It's a beautiful story about the power of stories to help us make sense of our…
December 14, 2007
There was a very astute comment left in response to my post on evolution and psychopaths:
Normal people (however you define that term) can be desensitized to the suffering of others. Soldiers fighting in a war - those who don't become shellshocked - become insensitive to killing and wounding.…
December 13, 2007
The latest issue of Nature has a thought-provoking article on new research trying to understand the psychopathic brain. On most psychological tests, psychopaths appear perfectly normal. Their working memory isn't impaired, they use language normally, and they don't have reduced attention spans. In…
December 13, 2007
Home sales are plummeting. In the Times, David Leonhardt focuses on Paramount, CA, site of the most precipitous drop in home sales in the country:
Just south of Los Angeles, there is a small city called Paramount where houses have all but stopped selling.
Since the summer, only about three homes a…
December 12, 2007
Paul Ekman, the eminent UCSF psychologist, has a new exhibit of his photography on display at the Exploratorium in San Francisco. The photographs are primarily of the South Fore people, an isolated group living in the New Guinea highlands. Ekman was studying their facial expressions, trying to…
December 11, 2007
The answer is a tenuous yes, although it depends on where you live. If your local utility burns lots of coal, then perhaps you should stick with a fuel efficient compact car. If you don't know how your local utility generates electricity, then check out this nifty website from the EPA.
December 11, 2007
I'm honored/flattered/thrilled/etc. to have Proust Was A Neuroscientist listed as one of the 25 best non-fiction books of the year by the LA Times. Other science-themed* books included on the list are The Atomic Bazaar, by William Langewiesche and Leviathan: The History of Whaling in America by…
December 11, 2007
Shakespeare bent language in peculiar ways. He had a habit of violating our conventional grammatical categories, so that nouns became verbs and adjectives were turned into nouns. (This is known as a functional shift.) Here's Phillip Davis:
Thus in "Lear" for example, Edgar comparing himself to the…
December 11, 2007
Jason Kottke, a consistent fount of great links, finds a revealing interview with David Foster Wallace about Infinite Jest. Here is DFW answering a question about whether or not his novel actually follows a fractal form*:
David Foster Wallace: That's one of the things, structurally, that's going on…
December 10, 2007
No, it's not an oxymoron: philosophers have discovered the virtue of experimentation.
Now a restive contingent of our tribe is convinced that it can shed light on traditional philosophical problems by going out and gathering information about what people actually think and say about our thought…
December 8, 2007
The Times takes the FCX for a spin. The good news is that it drives like an ordinary car, even though it runs on hydrogen:
Normalcy is a recurring, and intentional, theme of the FCX Clarity. It is refueled using a high-pressure connector tucked behind a typical gas-cap door on the rear fender. It…
December 8, 2007
So I was out to dinner recently with some friends and the conversation eventually degenerated into a dork competition. The rules of the game are simple (and extremely dorky). Each person confesses the single dorkiest thing about them. The winner gets a beer. Competing entries ranged from a friend…
December 6, 2007
So the new Seed is now on the newstands. I've got a longish essay sketching out possible future interactions between science and art:
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…
December 6, 2007
The data is hard to believe:
It has long been known that dyslexics are drawn to running their own businesses, where they can get around their weaknesses in reading and writing and play on their strengths. But a new study of entrepreneurs in the United States suggests that dyslexia is much more…
December 5, 2007
From VSL comes this list of truly weird scientific studies. My favorite was this one, which "assesses the link between country music and metropolitan suicide rates":
Country music is hypothesized to nurture a suicidal mood through its concerns with problems common in the suicidal population, such…
December 5, 2007
From the great Harold McGee comes an investigation into raw milk, bacteria and cultural evolution:
On our journey up to the Stichelton Dairy last September, Mr. Hodgson [a cheesemaker] explained how cheese quality progressed for centuries, then declined in the age of mass production and…
December 4, 2007
As I note in my book, the most famous impressionists all suffered from serious medical problems:
Monet became blind (but didn't stop painting the bridges of Giverny). Vincent Van Gogh, drinker of kerosene, turpentine, and absinthe, probably thought the coronas he painted around stars and…
December 4, 2007
I had the pleasure of driving for a few hours in yesterday's New England blizzard. (I was coming back from a radio interview for "On Point," which is broadcast out of WBUR in Boston. You can listen to me here.) While driving up a white I-93, I counted more than a dozen vehicles that had lost…
December 1, 2007
PZ attacks religious beliefs with his usual angry panache:
Religion is a bad thing. It encourages people to believe in things that are not true. It really is as simple as that; we'd be better off if people valued truth over comfortable delusions.
Unlike most Americans, I don't believe in angels,…
November 30, 2007
Don't worry, the period of shameless self-promotion is almost over. But Proust Was A Neuroscientist has been in the news lately. The San Francisco Chronicle had a very kind review:
Interpreters of Woolf and Proust are legion, but Lehrer is gifted with the ability to find philosophy in science and…
November 29, 2007
Ian McEwan is mischievous. He ends Enduring Love - a novel about a science writer - with a carefully faked psychiatric study from a non-existent British medical journal. Although the syndrome discussed in the article is real - De Clerambault's Syndrome is the delusional belief that someone else is…
November 28, 2007
Watching this clip of a kid who has spent way too much time on Guitar Hero 2 reminded me of the classic study of the somatosensory cortex in string players:
Magnetic source imaging revealed that the cortical representation of the digits of the left hand of string players was larger than that in…
November 28, 2007
So the Times didn't think much of science books this year. Personally, I think the three big omissions from the "Notable" list are Musicophilia, Isaacson's Einstein and The Stuff of Thought. What other science books did you think were notable this year? I'm not sure how "notable" is supposed to be…