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
October 2, 2007
You know what I think of when I read stories like this?
The pace of change [in the polar ice caps] has far exceeded what had been estimated by almost all the simulations used to envision how the Arctic will respond to rising concentrations of greenhouse gases linked to global warming. But that…
October 2, 2007
The transition from basic science to useful technology is so unpredictable. Look, for example, at DNA. Ten years ago, everybody assumed that the payoff of the genetic revolution would arrive in the form of gene therapy. We'd cure disease by tinkering with our genome. Well, that didn't work out so…
October 1, 2007
There are lies, damn lies and statistics. Last week, the newspapers were filled with stories about rising divorce rates. It was widely reported that couples that married in the 1970's had a less than even chance of celebrating their 25th wedding anniversary. But those statistics were misleading.…
October 1, 2007
Over at the MIT Tech Review website, neuroscientist Ed Boyden argues for brain augmentation:
It's arguably time for a discipline to emerge around the idea of human augmentation. At the MIT Media Lab, we are beginning to search for principles that govern the use of technology to augment human…
September 28, 2007
In light of Mahmoud Ahmadenijad's recent comment about there being no gay people in Iran, Matthew Yglesias links to this really interesting article about homosexuals in Saudi Arabia:
What seems more startling, at least from a Western perspective, is that some of the men having sex with other men…
September 26, 2007
From David Leonhardt:
There appears to be a growing happiness gap between men and women.
Two new research papers, using very different methods, have both come to this conclusion. Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers, economists at the University of Pennsylvania (and a couple), have looked at the…
September 26, 2007
Fear isn't our most rational feeling; the amygdala is an inherently inscrutable bit of brain. Tyler Cowen makes a good point about how the irrationality of fear manifests itself with global warming:
I believe, for instance, that ocean acidification will, in the long run, be the most dangerous…
September 25, 2007
Here's Drake Bennett:
In a set of experiments carried out in 2005 by the economists Nina Mazar and Dan Ariely, of MIT, and On Amir, a marketing expert at the University of California at San Diego, subjects were given a timed test of general-knowledge questions and paid for each correct answer. They…
September 25, 2007
Can you engineer a yawn to become perfectly contagious?
A number of studies found that a medley of ordinary yawns on video played to a classroom for five minutes would induce a responsive yawn in 55 percent of the audience. So that was his starting point: could he design a yawn powerful enough to…
September 24, 2007
1) Away, by Amy Bloom. The prose is perfect. It's the best written new novel you'll read this year, and that's saying something, since Ian McEwan also came out with a new novel. Another interesting thing about the book is that I almost didn't buy it because the cover is so terrible, or at least…
September 24, 2007
Loss aversion is so easy to understand - it can be explained using a coin flip in ten seconds - and yet it manages to explain so many anomalies of modern life*, from the 4th down habits of football coaches to the collapsing real estate market:
The professors gathered data on almost 6,000 Boston…
September 21, 2007
Like many Patriots fans, I've been suffering from an acute case of cognitive dissonance ever since I learned about Bill Belichick's taping habits. On the one hand, I know cheating is wrong. On the other hand, winning sure feels good. The end result is that I deftly rationalize away the sin, and…
September 21, 2007
Context is everything:
Sana Klaric and husband Adnan, who used the names "Sweetie" and "Prince of Joy" in an online chatroom, spent hours telling each other about their marriage troubles, Metro.co.uk reported.
The truth emerged when the two turned up for a date. Now the pair, from Zenica in…
September 21, 2007
Alan Greenspan seems to have discovered the irrationality of human nature. In his recent appearance on the Daily Show, he lamented the stubborn persistence of financial bubbles, from junk bonds to dot-com stocks to real estate. (For a thorough history of bubbles, from tulips to today, check out…
September 20, 2007
I've said it before and I'll say it again: the vast majority of hybrid cars aren't worth the surcharge. You'd get much better mileage with a smaller engine, especially if it was a clean diesel. What worries me about hybrids is that they seem to satisfy this bourgeois lust for environmentally…
September 20, 2007
So it's the High Holy Day season again - the pious two weeks in the Jewish calendar connecting Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur - and that means that many American Jews are going to shul. For most of these religious observers, this will be their only trip to temple during the year (unless, of course,…
September 19, 2007
There's a really wonderful article by Oliver Sacks in the New Yorker this week, excerpted from his forthcoming Musicophilia. I've got a profile of Sacks in the next issue of Seed (hitting newsstands soon), which was a real thrill to write, since he's always been one of my intellectual heroes. Here'…
September 18, 2007
Rachel Donadio, over at the Times Book Review, had an interesting little essay on the canon wars, Allan Bloom and the fate of the humanities. But what caught my eye was this melancholy paragraph:
All this reflects what the philosopher Martha Nussbaum today describes as a "loss of respect for the…
September 18, 2007
One of the more fascinating bits of research I couldn't cram into my recent article on the bird brain concerned some work out Erich Jarvis' lab. In 2004, Jarvis and colleagues found that songbirds have a nearly identical version of a gene known as FoxP2 that has been linked to inherited language…
September 17, 2007
One day, your iPod will be made out of biological flesh. Just kidding. In general, I'm a pretty staunch skeptic of The Singularity, but I've got to admit that experiments like this are pretty rad:
A team in Silver's HMS lab led by Caroline Ajo-Franklin, now at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory…
September 17, 2007
I've always thought someone could make a great television show by featuring some of the more bizarre and enlightening neurological syndromes that afflict the human brain. What is it like, for example, to not have an amygdala, or OFC, or insula? Or to be suffering from Capgras syndrome? Or to have…
September 17, 2007
I've got an article in yesterday's Boston Globe on the acute intelligence of birds, which is a by-product of their sociality:
There is a growing scientific recognition of the genius of birds. Scientists are now studying various birds to explore everything from spatial memory to the grammatical…
September 16, 2007
Gary Taubes has a pretty damning takedown of modern epidemiology at the Times Magazine:
In the case of H.R.T. [Hormone Replacement Therapy], as with most issues of diet, lifestyle and disease, the hypotheses begin their transformation into public-health recommendations only after they've received…
September 14, 2007
David Brooks makes a really smart macro point today about one of the big themes of modern neuroscience. His op-ed (Times $elect) is about the decline of IQ as a general metric of intelligence:
Today, the research that dominates public conversation is not about raw brain power but about the…
September 14, 2007
There was something sad yet slightly poignant about watching President Bush's speech on Iraq last night. I thought Andrew Sullivan got the atmospherics exactly right:
He seemed almost broken to me. His voice raspy, his eyes watery, his affect exhausted, his facial expression almost bewildered. I…
September 13, 2007
The new Kanye West album is solid, although it could use a dose of ironic humor. But that's neither here nor there. What interests me about Kanye is his masterful ability to embed hooks and samples into the background of his songs. He'll literally repeat the same three second acoustic loop over and…
September 12, 2007
My vestibular system is totally confused:
See James Fallows for the explanation. Movies like this make me glad that pilots rely on gyroscopes to guide them through the clouds.
September 12, 2007
Just a quick note on the liberal/conservative psychological study that everyone is talking about. (Dave Munger has a thorough write-up here.) Color me dubious. My own bias is to distrust any experiment that tries to collapse extremely complex cognitive categories - such as political belief - into a…
September 12, 2007
Boy, was Descartes wrong. His philosophy of duality divided our being into two distinct substances: a holy soul and a mortal carcass. The soul was the source of reason, science and everything nice. Our flesh, on the other hand, was "clocklike," just a machine that bleeds. With this schism,…
September 10, 2007
There are so many stupid studies of the gendered brain that it's easy to conclude that good research into psychological sex differences is impossible. But that would be a mistake. I think one of most interesting recent investigations into the cognitive differences of men and women comes from a…