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
October 31, 2007
It really is one of the great culinary techniques, and yet it's almost never used. I'm talking about salt roasting, and Russ Parsons has put together a lovely introduction to the subject. Basically, you bury a piece of protein in a mound of kosher salt. Put the dish in a hot oven and bake for 20…
October 30, 2007
Ever wanted to fly through a neocortical column? Yeah, me too. The bad news is that, until I manage to shrink myself to the micron level, such a flight is probably impossible. This computer simulated video is probably the closest I'll get.
October 30, 2007
I've always wondered about why manual transmissions generally get better mileage than automatics. The answer is surprisingly simple: humans are better shifters.
According to the Environmental Protection Agency's fuel economy ratings, cars with manual transmissions typically beat their automatic…
October 30, 2007
The Cartesian wall separating the mind and body has been so thoroughly deconstructed that it's newsworthy when a bodily condition is not affected by our mental state. After all, recent studies have shown that everything from chronic back pain to many auto-immune diseases are all modulated by…
October 29, 2007
I linked to an interesting new paper in Frontiers in Neuroscience last week, but I thought it was worth talking a bit more about the journal itself. It's a brand new publication, which attempts to completely transform the peer review process. The journal grew out of frustration with the traditional…
October 29, 2007
A note to readers: For the next few weeks, this blog is going on a book tour. So if you're averse to self-promotion and blatant shows of immodesty (I promise to also link to the negative reviews!), or just aren't interested in Proust Was A Neuroscientist, then I kindly suggest you check back in…
October 24, 2007
An intriguing new hypothesis that seeks to explain all of the diverse psychological symptoms associated with autism. Here's the abstract:
While significant advances have been made in identifying the neuronal structures and cells affected, a unifying theory that could explain the manifold autistic…
October 23, 2007
Forgive the light posting. I've been traveling. I'm now in Switzerland, reporting a story that I'm sure we'll be talking about later. But for now, I'd like to share a few thoughts on being an American abroad.
The first thought is sobering. One can't help but be impressed by the infrastructure of…
October 22, 2007
Taking advantage of a new Amazon feature, Steven Johnson does some literary data-mining:
The two stats that I found totally fascinating were "Average Words Per Sentence" and "% Complex Words," the latter defined as words with three or more syllables -- words like "ameliorate", "protoplasm" or "…
October 22, 2007
A nice article on birth order in the latest Time. One of the interesting things about birth order effects is that, although they are statistically subtle, people have been noticing the consistent differences between first and last borns for a long time. It's one of those examples of folk psychology…
October 22, 2007
My book got a very nice little spread in the new Wired. There's a picture of me at an uncomfortable zoom and a short Q&A:
Q: Do you really think that we'll find answers to science's Big Questions in the arts?
A: Virginia Woolf isn't going to help you finish your lab experiment. What she will do…
October 20, 2007
The New Yorker recently had a cool short story by T.C. Boyle about a boy who couldn't experience pain. The story is told from the perspective of a doctor who has trouble believing that the symptoms of the child are real. The mother pleads:
"He's not normal, doctor. He doesn't feel pain the way…
October 19, 2007
America is getting good at exporting our diseases. Everybody already talks about obesity and the way American eating habits are slowly fattening up the rest of the world. But that's not the only disease we are sending abroad. Here's VSL*:
Americans are on pretty chummy terms with depression,…
October 18, 2007
Bldg blog writes an ode to LA:
L.A. is the apocalypse: it's you and a bunch of parking lots. No one's going to save you; no one's looking out for you. It's the only city I know where that's the explicit premise of living there - that's the deal you make when you move to L.A.
The city, ironically,…
October 17, 2007
Hendrick Hertzberg takes on the Navy sonar technology which is killing whales:
Whales live in a world of sound. A large part of their brains, which in many species are larger than ours, is devoted to processing sound. We don't know how they subjectively experience the processed sound, but it is…
October 17, 2007
Joseph LeDoux helped make the amygdala famous - his seminal studies of fear conditioning illuminated, among other things, the importance of unconscious processing - so it's only fitting that he would be part of a rock band called The Amygdaloids.
Imagine Jefferson Airplane, with perhaps a dash of…
October 16, 2007
As heard recently on The Daily Show:
Those guys don't know membrane vesicles from their taint.
It's a funny line, but membrane vesicles are serious stuff. Just ask Jack Szostak:
Our goal is generate a nucleic acid system that can replicate accurately and rapidly, without any enzymatic assistance.…
October 16, 2007
So my book, Proust Was A Neuroscientist, is now shipping from Amazon and Barnes and Noble. It might even be in your local bookstore. I'll do my best not to turn this blog into an orgy of self-promotion, but feel free to check out some of the early blurbs (from Oliver Sacks, Joe Ledoux, Antonio…
October 16, 2007
It's an audacious idea, and I didn't believe it was possible until I saw the video. But it really is possible to teach blind people to see using their tongue. By connecting a camera to an array of electrodes that stimulate the sensitive nerves inside the mouth - a pixel of light is translated into…
October 13, 2007
The correlation is pretty clear: the older we get, the happier we become.
Only in the last decade have researchers begun to measure happiness across the life span and, in doing so, try to understand why older people tend to be so content.
The explanation doesn't appear to be biological -- some…
October 11, 2007
Here's Vaughan on a neat grammatical shortcut:
Whilst drinking with a psycholinguist (say that after a few pints) I was taught a useful way of quickly working out the stressed syllable in any English word - something which is apparently called the 'fuck test'.
Simply insert the word 'fucking' into…
October 11, 2007
Alex Ross brings my attention to a recent letter in Science:
"...Watanabe and Sato [Behav. Processes 47, 1 (1999)] have shown that Java sparrows can discriminate between Bach's French Suite no. 5 in G minor and Arnold Schoenberg's Suite for Piano opus 25. The birds were also able to generalize new…
October 10, 2007
Or at least they play the ultimatum game more rationally than humans:
German researchers have demonstrated chimpanzees make choices that protect their self-interest more consistently than do humans.
Researchers from the Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig studied the chimp'…
October 8, 2007
In the latest New Yorker, the always fascinating and fair Jerome Groopman* has an article on the recent Science paper documenting neural activity in vegetative patients:
For four months, Kate Bainbridge had not spoken or responded to her family or her doctors, although her eyes were often open and…
October 6, 2007
This year, California will spend three times as much operating its prisons than running the UC system.
October 5, 2007
This seems like a really good thing:
In this isolated Taliban stronghold in eastern Afghanistan, American paratroopers are fielding what they consider a crucial new weapon in counterinsurgency operations here: a soft-spoken civilian anthropologist named Tracy.
Tracy, who asked that her surname not…
October 4, 2007
I think the NY Times Style section should invest in a resident evolutionary psychologist. Its pages are often filled with the most blatant examples of human nature and sexual selection. The scientist could also help me understand stories like this:
Dr. David Stoker, a plastic surgeon in Marina Del…
October 4, 2007
It's not easy to re-educate our sense of taste. Britain is learning that the hard way:
Two years ago, celebrity chef Jamie Oliver expressed horror at the Turkey Twizzlers being served in Britain's school cafeterias and equated many school lunches with a four-letter word for the ultimate byproduct…
October 3, 2007
Wired has a fascinating interview with Oliver Sacks about music. I particularly enjoyed this question from Steve Silberman about the joys of combining a good melody with drugs:
Wired: You write that there was a time in med school when you took a lot of amphetamines. What's the most vivid experience…