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
September 7, 2007
Yawning is famously contagious. Except that is, if you're autistic. Here's Mindhacks:
The study showed that children with autism were far less likely to yawn in response to watching others do the same.
Often, autistic social difficulties are put down to a problem with 'theory of mind' the ability…
September 7, 2007
From Primo Levi's Survival in Auschwitz:
Sooner of later, everyone discovers that perfect happiness is unrealizable, but there are few who pause to consider the antithesis: that perfect unhappiness is equally unattainable. The obstacles preventing the realization of both these extreme states are of…
September 7, 2007
In my post on warm milk and sleepiness - the dairy acts like a placebo - a commenter made an astute point:
what does "placebo" mean in that context? If you have developed the pathways that insist on Warm Milk = Time to Sleep, that effect is very real...
Whether purely conditioned, or based on some…
September 6, 2007
From Tyler Cowen:
1. In Danish data, if a CEO's child dies, the value of that CEO's company falls by one-fifth in the following two years.
2. If a CEO's wife dies, the value of that CEO's company falls by fifteen percent.
3. If a CEO's mother-in-law dies, the value of that CEO's company rises…
September 6, 2007
Is it bad if your favorite philosophy comes in aphorism form? This is why I've always enjoyed Wittgenstein: his writing has the density of plutonium, since it's just pre-digested quotes. I can read it without having to remember what anomalous monism is. Now Colin McGinn, who's one of my favorite…
September 6, 2007
Chemistry gets short shrift. Theoretical physics and neuroscience and molecular biology get all the sexy press, while chemistry departments slowly wither away. In many respects, this is just because chemistry has been so successful: there don't seem to be any great unknowns or theoretical gaps left…
September 6, 2007
So tax breaks for philanthropy increase inequality:
For every three dollars they give away, the federal government typically gives up a dollar or more in tax revenue, because of the charitable tax deduction and by not collecting estate taxes.
[snip]
The charitable deduction cost the government $40…
September 5, 2007
One of the innate limitations of every intelligence test is that the test is forced to conflate the measurable aspects of intelligence with a general definition of intelligence. What can't be quantified is ignored. And what can be easily quantified is privileged. The end result is a woefully…
September 5, 2007
My own experience tells me that a glass of warm milk is a potent sedative. All it takes is a few ounces of heated dairy before my eye lids start getting real heavy.
It turns out, though, that warm milk is just a placebo. It works because I think it works.
According to age-old wisdom, milk is chock…
September 4, 2007
I'm a big fan of Mad Men, the new HBOesque drama about 1960's advertising executives on AMC. It's basically an extended melodrama about why the Ike years actually sucked, and neatly punctures that lame American nostalgia for the "simpler" times of the middle twentieth century.
One of the subplots…
September 2, 2007
Saw Bill and Hillary today. I'll spare you my political commentary, except for two brief observations:
1) Hillary's biggest applause line came when she declared that, once she's President, she'll "listen to what scientists say and stop being so anti-science". Much to my surprise, the crowd loved it…
August 31, 2007
The new Honda Accord comes out next month and, like virtually every new car, it boasts a bigger frame and bigger engine than last year's model. So I thought it might be worth revisiting some of the earlier generation Accords. It turns out that they were signifcantly more fuel efficient. For example…
August 31, 2007
A few weeks ago, I put up a post on the neuroscience of subprime mortgages. A significant percentage of subprime loans get customers by advertising low introductory teaser rates, which trick the brain into making an irrational decision. In essence, we are duped into using our short-sighted…
August 31, 2007
Christopher Vrountas, of Andover, sent in a very astute letter to the Boston Globe in response to my recent article on dopamine and gambling:
I read Jonah Lehrer's article "Your brain on gambling" (Ideas, Aug. 19), about how gambling hijacks the brain's pleasure centers. The gambler's brain…
August 30, 2007
Two examples of blinkered thinking:
1. Jeff Lewis, the incredibly entertaining lunatic at the center of Flipping Out, the real-estate reality television show on Bravo, fires his psychic because she wasn't doing a good job of predicting the future. So what does he do? He goes and hires a different…
August 30, 2007
Here's Megan McArdle on our self-perceptions of attractiveness:
A late night conversation last night brought me to the inescapable conclusion that neither I, nor anyone else, is as hot as they think they are.
You hate photographs of yourself, don't you? A tiny minority of people are terribly…
August 29, 2007
Ten years ago, neuroscientists were bullish about pharmaceuticals. It sometimes seemed as if every tenured professor was starting his own drug company or consulting for someone else's drug company. But virtually none of those drugs have come to market, at least not yet. The brain is an exquisitely…
August 29, 2007
Last week, we discussed the differences between reading text printed on dead trees (paper) and reading on a computer screen. I confessed that I'm wedded to my laser printer, since I can only edit when I've got the tactile page in my hand.
It turns out I'm not alone. William Powers, the media…
August 28, 2007
For me, the most depressing aspect of the Michael Vick dog-fighting case is that I can't draw a bright moral line between his acts of sadism and the publicly acceptable forms of animal cruelty that we all support in the supermarket. (I'm talking about the cheap meat from big poultry farms and…
August 27, 2007
Daniel Dennett, in the latest Technology Review, argues that there's no meaningful difference between the chess cognition of Deep Blue and that of Gary Kasparov. Both are functionalist machines, employing mental shortcuts to settle on an optimal strategy:
The best computer chess is well nigh…
August 24, 2007
The Best Cigarette, a poem by Billy Collins:
Don't forget that cigarette addiction seems to be modulated by the insula, a brain area that secretes aversive emotions. Earlier this year, a team of scientists at the University of Iowa found that cigarette addicts with damaged insulas were 136 times…
August 24, 2007
Our mind has a sick sense of humor. It turns out that as we lose our memory, and sink into the darkness of dementia, the last memories to disappear are the memories we spent our lives trying to repress. So the final thing that you know is what you've been trying to forget:
For more than half a…
August 23, 2007
Here's a very cool experiment:
Using virtual reality goggles, a camera and a stick, scientists have induced out-of-body experiences -- the sensation of drifting outside of one's own body -- in healthy people, according to experiments being published in the journal Science.
When people gaze at an…
August 23, 2007
You often hear scientists and philosophers of science talk about the peer-review process as if it's some epistemological magic trick, as if it automatically sifts through the mass of submitted articles and finds The Truth. Of course, if you've ever been through the peer-review process you know that…
August 23, 2007
I thought this obit was rather fascinating. Not only did I learn about phone phreaks - a subculture I'm ashamed to say I didn't know existed - but Joybubbles sounds like an utterly unique person, truly an n of 1.
Joybubbles (the legal name of the former Joe Engressia since 1991), a blind genius…
August 22, 2007
Silas Weir Mitchell was a great American neurologist. Unfortunately, he's best known now for pioneering "the rest cure," which became a common treatment for hysteria and other afflictions of the "frail female nervous system". (See, for example, "The Yellow Wallpaper," by Charlotte Perkins Gilman.)…
August 22, 2007
A few months ago, when I was writing an article on cities and metabolic theory for the latest issue of Seed, I spent several frustrating hours trying to explain the underlying logic of metabolic theory. For those who don't know, metabolic theory is a set of simple equations that are capable of…
August 21, 2007
I'm one of those writers who can't edit on a computer. After I write something, I'm always forced to print it out on dead trees, so that I can fix my sentences. When I try to edit on the computer, I always miss repetitions, redundancies and other bits of bad writing that I easily catch when I've…
August 21, 2007
Two economists have studied the effects "of classroom gender composition on scholastic achievements of boys and girls in Israeli primary, middle, and high schools." They wanted to know if having a disproportionate number of one gender in the classroom influences academic performance. Their…
August 20, 2007
This is the car I covet:
And I don't just want the new variant of the Volvo C30 because it's oh so cute:
Called the C30 Efficiency, this special car will sip diesel fuel at the rate of 4.5L per every 100 kilometers. That's 52.26 mpg to us Yanks. It achieves these numbers using a variety of…