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
August 20, 2007
Pardon the self-promotion, but I've got an article in yesterday's Boston Globe on neuroscience and gambling:
The growth of the gambling industry has been accompanied by a large amount of new scientific research explaining the effects of gambling on the brain. The neural circuits manipulated by…
August 20, 2007
There's an illuminating four part series looking at neuroscientist Gary Lynch in the LA Times. It's written by Terry McDermott. What makes this series so compelling is that it does two things rarely done by science journalists.
First of all, the articles present Gary Lynch as a complex human being…
August 18, 2007
This seems like a pretty terrible policy:
Eric Miller's career as an Army Ranger wasn't ended by a battlefield wound, but his DNA.
Lurking in his genes was a mutation that made him vulnerable to uncontrolled tumor growth. After suffering back pain during a tour in Afghanistan, he underwent three…
August 17, 2007
Given the recent bursting of the housing bubble (let's hope, at least, that we've hit rock bottom), Kevin Drum raises an interesting issue:
Bubbles come along with some frequency these days, always with some shiny new reason for bankers to become irrationally exhuberant. Just in the last couple of…
August 16, 2007
Here's a cool new music site. The premise of the site, musicovery.com, is simple: you pick a mood (somewhere between the poles of "energetic," "dark," "calm," or "positive"), select a few musical genres and a favorite decade, and then the site automatically finds songs that reflect your state of…
August 15, 2007
Tyler Cowen summarizes a few of the more surprising aspects of the Flynn effect, which refers to the phenomenon of rising scores on mental ability tests (like the IQ test) from one generation to the next:
1. Non-verbal IQ has risen more rapidly than has verbal IQ.
2. Performance gains are smallest…
August 15, 2007
The Boston Globe recently had an interesting article on some possible downsides of societal diversity, which have been uncomfortably quantified by Robert Putnam, a political scientist at Harvard. Putnam has found that:
...the greater the diversity in a community, the fewer people vote and the less…
August 14, 2007
I had the pleasure of studying philosophy with Nick Bostrom while at Oxford. He's a great teacher, but, unlike John Tierney, I'm not persuaded by his latest conjecture:
Until I talked to Nick Bostrom, a philosopher at Oxford University, it never occurred to me that our universe might be somebody…
August 14, 2007
Little kids love McDonald's:
Hamburgers, french fries, chicken nuggets, and even milk and carrots all taste better to children if they think they came from McDonald's, a small study suggests.
In taste tests with 63 children ages 3 to 5, there was only a slight preference for the McDonald's-branded…
August 13, 2007
There is wonderful, disturbing, and extremely graphic article in last week's New Yorker (not online) about Lesch-Nyhan syndrome, a mysterious disorder characterized by excessive amounts of uric acid and a dangerous tendency to injure oneself. In its bleakest incarnation, Lesch-Nyhan turns victims…
August 10, 2007
Jon Stewart, interviewing Tal Ben-Shahar, who teaches a positive psychology class at Harvard:
"I was a psychology major, so I know a lot of it is bullshit."
Watch the video here.
August 10, 2007
So the financial markets are all upset. Stocks began the morning with another steep slide. The media, of course, is covering the growing liquidity crisis in excruciating detail, spending lots of hours and column inches analyzing the latest rumors and sentiments on Wall Street. But here's my advice…
August 9, 2007
The shit is hitting the fan: all those sub-prime mortgages given out so recklessly over the past two years are getting their interest rates re-adjusted. And that, of course, is when the foreclosures begin.
By most measures, sub-prime loans are a bad idea. Look, for example, at the popular 2/28 loan…
August 9, 2007
Here's your feel-good story of the day. (It feels even better if you're a fan of The Wire. And if you're not a fan of The Wire, then you've made a very big mistake.) The story is a helpful reminder that it's never too late to change your life: the mind is a gloriously plastic thing.
Donnie Andrews…
August 8, 2007
As the author of a book that's equally divided between descriptions of neuroscience and descriptions of art, I've spent far too much time pondering the organization of book stores. How should books be classified? Is my book a "science" book, or does it belong in the neglected "Criticism and Essays…
August 7, 2007
It turns out that moving to the sun belt will help you live longer. Here's the NBER abstract:
We estimate that the number of annual deaths attributable to cold temperature is 27,940 or 1.3% of total deaths in the US. This effect is even larger in low income areas. Because the U.S. population has…
August 7, 2007
Addiction factoid of the Day:
Psychiatrist Lee Robins found that almost half of American soldiers used heroin or opium while in Vietnam, but rather fewer were actually addicted, and almost 90 percent of those kicked the habit upon returning to the United States.
The reality of addiction is that it'…
August 7, 2007
History tends to make even the most unlikely revolutions seem inevitable. Looking backwards to the 18th century, it's easy to conclude that the Industrial Revolution was bound to happen, that the forward march of modernity was predestined.
But what this fatalistic view of history overlooks is just…
August 6, 2007
Thanks for your patience while I was on vacation. If I wasn't so jet-lagged, I'd probably feel really relaxed. (I'm currently in that circadian netherworld that not even caffeine can fix.)
Hopefully, I'll get around to blogging about the books I read while away. But for now, let me just say that I…
July 27, 2007
A note to my readers: I'll be on vacation for the next week, so please pardon the sporadic posting.
Thanks, Jonah
July 24, 2007
Simon Baron-Cohen, of mindblindness fame, uses autism to examine the psychology of dishonesty. He concludes that the central reason people with autism are so honest (and so vulnerable to liars) is that they have difficulty developing a theory of mind for other people.
And then there are people with…
July 24, 2007
This truth thing is difficult:
In 1977, Steven Weinberg, then two years shy of the Nobel Prize in Physics, decided to do a little of what some theorists call "ambulance chasing."
He heard a rumor, while spending a year at Stanford, that collisions at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory were…
July 23, 2007
Are bonobos really such peaceful beatniks? Is is true that they like to make love, not war? The truth is that nobody really knows. Ian Parker has a fascinating profile of the species, and our attempts to learn about the species, in the latest New Yorker:
This pop image of the bonobo--equal parts…
July 23, 2007
A truly depressing analysis of the justice system (Times $elect):
Brandon L. Garrett, a law professor at the University of Virginia, has, for the first time, systematically examined the 200 cases, in which innocent people served an average of 12 years in prison. In each case, of course, the…
July 20, 2007
It's British Open season, which means that it's time to relive all the great golf chokes of recent years. No other course seems to cause golfers to crack under pressure quite like Carnoustie. (The most famous choke being Jean Van de Velde's collapse on the 18th hole in 1999.)
Why do golfers choke?…
July 19, 2007
Ramesh Ponnuru, of the National Review, says this:
What renders atheism incompatible with a coherent account of morality, when it is incompatible, is physicalism (or what is sometimes described as reductive materialism). If it is true that the universe consists entirely and without remainder of…
July 19, 2007
Some crimes are beyond the pale of comprehension. This is one of those:
After dark on June 18, the police say, as many as 10 armed assailants repeatedly raped a Haitian immigrant in her apartment at Dunbar Village and then went further, forcing her to perform oral sex on her 12-year-old son. They…
July 17, 2007
This is just sad:
Harrah's New Orleans, the largest casino in the city, is on pace for its best year ever: gambling revenue is up 13.6 percent through the first five months of 2007 compared with the same period in 2005, pre-Katrina.
The casinos in this region are generating more revenue -- from…